Wi^y ^» 5 I— ( -^ ^:§ [^ J^ o U2 § Ul ■^ ^ ^ II Jz; l-H <1 i 1 If O H S3 » H :5* < ;z; OQ t: sT S ej O :3 O E^ H 11 P^ Ph P4 ;>H fi^ f^ m 1 120 CHAPTER 11. THE DRAMA. What is dramatic ? To this query Augustus William von Schlegel has vouchsafed two answers j first, the answer which he thinks would be most commonly given, and which, as things common are unclean to a German, he dismisses with very little ceremony ; next, the answer which to him seems best. In this latter it is very forcibly pointed out, what has been pointed out again and again, that action is an essential of the drama. It is the essential spirit of the drama j the matter of the beautiful. But herein is the question still unanswered, inasmuch as in its present place at the head of this chapter, and in the beginning of Schlegel' s discourses, it is clearly an inquiry into the form, not into the spirit, of the drama. The common herd acknowledge this in the reply which Augustus William, besides wording it in a very slovenly manner, has, like a true German critic, ever lusting after the show, were it only the show, of originality, treated so cavalierly. And there is another objection to his statement. For, al- THE DRAMA. 121 though it be most true that action is an essential of the dramatic, it is not true in his sense of the term. He understands by an action what Aristotle meant by an action ; an action having a definite beginning, middle, and end. In this view there would be a great deal of truth were we speaking of a five-act play ; but why may not a single scene be dramatic ? and a single mo- ment of that scene ? A painting, a sculptm^e, is one moment of a drama ; it has no such action, no such forward movement as Schlegel demands in the drama- tic ,* and yetj even when it is the picture of still life, we rightly say that it has or has not dramatic power. What is meant by this, the commonest, use of the term ? The question will best be answered by cross- questioning another much abused definition. All poesy has been defined by Aristotle to be an imitation ; the drama one kind of imitation, the epic another, the lyric a third ; all art, in short, even music, is mimetic or imitative. Greatly in vogue at one time, the commonplace of criticism, always at hand, and if not always of service, at least always ofiicious, the definition seems now, like a physician in a good old age, to have retired from practice. It is no longer in request. Having professed to em- brace all fine arts when it only embraced some, it has been gradually losing its influence, and although often quoted, as many an old doctor is consulted, it is rather in token of respect than with any hope of benefit. For 122 THE KINDS OF POESY. it is only by an enormous stretch of meaning that a narrative can be called an imitation. Aristotle himself allows (Poetic, xxiv. 7), that in so far as a poet speaks in his own person he is not an imitator ; and straining it to the uttermost cannot make the word apply to song, to music, to dancing, or to whatever in art is lyrical : although it was certainly natural enough that a critic living in the most dramatic period of Greek literature should endeavour to interpret art generally by the canon of the drama. In the plain and unforced ren- dering of the term, dramatic poesy alone is imitative. The Epic and the Lyric can be said to imitate only in so far as they can be said to dramatise. All dramatic art, then, is imitative, and all imitative art is dramatic. This definition is of such importance to a right understanding of the drama, strictly so called, that we must dwell upon it for a little, showing the connexion between the purely imitative arts of the dramatist on the one hand, of the painter and sculptor on the other. The whole scenery of a picture may of course be re- garded as dramatis jpersoncB ; as much so as the painted actors of the canvass, or the living actors of the stage. That rock is a stony-hearted villain : that flower is your sister asleep : the brook is a beautiful idiot bab- bling nonsense. But apart from such generalities, be it observed, that painting is romantic, and that sculpture is classical drama ; by which expressions I have already THE DRxlMA. 12:5 explained myself as meaning, in the one case, a drama truly such, in the other, a di'ama conceived in an epic spirit. A. W. Schlegel reports the saying of Hemster- huys, that the ancient painters were too much of sculptors, and that the modern sculptors are too much of painters. According to the above interpretation, the remark means, that the ancient pictures were epic in their tone, and that modern sculptures are more truly dramatic ; that the ancient artists could not save themselves, but whether with the pencil or with the chisel would give a classical or epic meaning to their works, and that the modern artists cannot save themselves, but whether with the pencil or with the chisel give a romantic or truly dra- matic meaning to their works. For, as a general rule, in sculp tm-e {that is to say, Greek sculpture), the face is without expression, at least of present feeling, whereas in Christian art it is all in all. Wherever character can be traced in the countenances of Greek sculpture, it is almost always an unmoved character, a character with- out present energy, but hinting a thousand probabilities of past history, a thousand possibilities of the future ; past and future — the symbols of those epic and lyrical tendencies which go to form the classical drama. The epic tone of sculptm-e is also shown by the fact, that often a character has no individual expression what- soever, and is recognised only by some conventional mark attached. " Take from Apollo his lyre," says Sir Joshua Eeynolds, '^ from Bacchus his thyrsus and 124 THE KINDS OF POESY. vine-leaves, and from Meleager the boar's head, and there will remain little or no difference in tlieir charac- ters. In a Juno, Minerva, or Flora, the idea of the artist seems to have gone no further than representing perfect beauty, and afterwards adding the proper attri- butes, with a total indifference to Avhich he gave them." Instead of making the statue speak for itself, as all purely dramatic art is bound to do, there is added, to tell the tale, an attribute, as Sir Joshua calls it, an arbitrary sign, a short -hand narrative. Proving the same thing is another fact, to understand the full significance of vrhich requires some acquaint- ance with the history of the stage. That history is the same in ever}^ countiy where it is allowed to unfold itself fi'eely, the same whether the drama be of the romantic or of the classical cast. For it stares us in the face, none can overlook, that the great names of the theatre in almost every language are grouped together by threes. Of these names, historians of each theatre say that the first belongs to its morning star, the second to its day star, the third to its evening star ; and so far they are right. But they might have seen farther, they might have seen not only that there is a period of rise, of progress, and of decline in every theatre, but also that the nature of that rise, of that progi'ess, and of that decline, is ever the same. So that the three stages through which the drama has every- where had to pass may be described, the first as full of THE DRAMA. 125 lyricism, the second as the most truly dramatic, and the third as highly epic. Thus in Greece, jEschyliis, So- phocles, Euripides : ^schylus, the leader of an army going forth to battle, and as they cross Alps and broad seas in their passage, singing the renown of their fore- fathers and their own triumphs to come, boasting, shouting, intensely lyrical ; Sophocles, the leader of an army engaged, whose works are many, whose words are few, very dramatic in his touches, often, as in the Antigone, quite romantic in his tone; Euripides, leading an army homewards, many wounded, some in rags, all wayworn, and telling the story of their disasters to women who come out to meet them with wailing — altogether of such an epic turn that, whether from choice or from necessity, he begins with a pro- logue which is a mere narrative to explain the situa- tion of the piece. Perhaps it would not be difficult to show that even in works of the same tragedians, I mean in their trilogies, the same order may be traced. In the trilogy of JEschylus, for example, the Aga- memnon is the most highly lyrical, being so full of heraldings and strange forebodings, and the prophetic utterance of Cassandra ] the Choephor^ is the most truly dramatic, containing as it does the decisive action of the piece, the murder of Clytemnestra by her son, and that action set forth not as past nor as future, but as tak- ing place now, in the living present ; while the Eume- nides is the most epic of all, being a recapitulation of 126 THE KINDS OF POESY. the past, a hearing of the case for and against the mur- derer, first at Delphi, and then in the conrt of the Areopagus. It will be more to the pui-pose, however, to run over the names of those who have followed a like course in the different theatres of Etu'ope. In Spain, there is Cervantes, called the Castilian ^schy- lus, and who, according to Sismondi, without much l}Tical talent gave his best endeavours to render the drama l}Tical ; Lope de Vega ; Calderon. In France, there is Corneille, Racine, Yoltaire. In Italv, there is Metastasio, the poet of the opera, like ^schylus in nothing but his lyricism ; there is Alfieri ; and for a third, if there be a third, Yincenzio Monti. In Ger- many, the rule is at fault ; for although there are indeed three names, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and although the two last fill their places well, Lessing affords no good specimen of the drama in its lyrical stage — pro- bably because the German drama was too much of an exotic. In England, owing to the overshadowing power of Shakespere, the lines of distinction are not so marked, but there they certainly are. First of all comes Chris- topher Marlowe, who died when Shakespere was begin- ning to be known, but whose lyrical tendency surs'ived in Beaumont and Fletcher ; then we have Shakespere himself ; last comes Ben Jonson, who, although abun- dantly lyrical in some of his pieces, sought more than any to give the classical or epic form to our regular drama. This law is of such vital import as a critical THE DRAMA. 1 27 canon (giving, for instance, to our present love of oper- atic music an interpretation the very opposite of tliat which is commonly held) that in order to establish it I have, while really flying over the ground as with seven-league boots, dwelt upon it longer than perhaps my present purpose will justify. It was to be shown that sculpture, dramatic in form, is, like the classical drama, epic in tone. This is borne out by the fact that for subjects chosen from the three Greek tragedians, artists were least of all beholden to Sophocles, and most of all to Euripides. Once more : that the relationship between painting and sculptm*e is the same as that between the romantic and the classical drama will be evident by glancing at the value given in each kind to the idea of locality. We have heard so much about the unities of time and place in the drama — righteously kept by the classical, ruthlessly broken by the romantic school — as might straightway lead one to the belief that the former deem time and place of the utmost importance, the latter of very little. There could not well be a greater mistake. The question of time may be laid aside, as not bearing on the point in hand. As for place it would certainly be an exaggeration to say that the Greek dramatists gave as little expression to it as if they were still going the round of the villages in the open cart of Thespis ; but it would be nearer the truth than the other view. From at least the time of Sophocles, some attention was 128 THE KINDS OF POESY. paid to scenery, and it may be safely asserted that the Greeks had not the very strict ideas which the French maintain regarding miity of place ; nevertheless, the binding of the drama, in so far as they did bind it, to one spot, was thus far a slighting of place. For if in one place are performed actions suitable to two or three very different localities, the beholder must learn to over- look the characteristics of the scene before him ; the scene becomes anywhere, and anywhere is nowhere. This forgetfulness, however, this disregard of place, is not peculiar to the classical drama ; it belongs to every- thing classical, as, on the other hand, romantic art de- lights not simply in giving a background to its figures, but even in representing that background without any living figures whatsoever. Poems descriptive of the country, the mere country, are found in modern, not in ancient times. To account for this. Twining will have it that the ancients had no such poems, because they had no landscape painting ; that they had no Thomson, poet of the seasons, because they had no Claude to paint the seasons. One might as well say, that in Shetland a cow is small because a pony is small, or that the oak will not thrive there because the beech will not thrive. Why are there in Shetland no forest trees at all ? Why no Claude in Greece ? Campbell, reason- ably dissatisfied with the logic of Twining, has, in his life of Thomson, found a cause partly, it would seem, in the civilizing influences of philosophy and of free- THE DllAMA. 129 dora (surely forgetting tliat the Greeks had pliik^sophy abundant as light, and freedom elastic as air) ; but chiefly in that influence of Christianity which has given such height and depth and length and breadth to our fellow-feeling with all nature, as being the image of the divine. With this remark, if he has not hit the bull's-eye, he has at least not missed the target. Chris- tianity is indeed the cause, although a doubt may arise whether Campbell has fully seized the manner. It is a great deal to know that the spirit of a certain effect agTees with that of its supposed cause, that the spirit of Christianity and of landscape-painting are one ; but to be assured that these twain stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect, we should like to know that the one gives shape as well as spirit to the other. This may be shown as follows. It has been stated more than once already, that romantic, or modern, or Christian art, is essentially dramatic. Hitherto I have rested this doctrine rather on historic than on any other grounds, but it may be proved philosophically. Given Christianity, it was to be expected from its very nature that should it ever express itself in art, the art should be dramatic. Without here entering into the proof, tempting though such a discussion be, this hint may be sufficient in the meantime, that Christian art must be dramatic, since it needs no Thomas a Kempis to show that Christian life is in all its outward manifestations an imitative life. As Christianity thus begets dramatic 1 130 THE KINDS OF POESY. art, so I may be allowed simply to state here what I hope to prove in its proper place, namely, in handling the language of the drama, (see p. 207) that the dramatic, the first law of poetry, engenders the idea of place. When Shakespere speaks of a " local habitation" given to airy nothings by the imagination, he refers to that work of imagination which he best knew, its dramatic working. Thus it is because of its thorough dramatism that modern art in almost everything it touches, and above all in its imitative touches, brings forward, and dwells upon, and presses home the idea of locality. And thus also, remembering how little statuary has to do with place, it is shown that when the romantic drama is called picturesque, and the classical drama sculptur- esque, these very common epithets express not a mere fancied resemblance, but a resemblance founded deep in the nature of things. These remarks are by no means foreign to the ques- tion before us ; they bear upon it directly. For if dra- matic art and imitative thus blend and tally, it will be clear that to ascertain the ruling idea of the drama, strictly so called, we have a right to obtain evidence from the kindred arts of painting and of sculpture, and to regard that evidence as conclusive. The arts of imitation aim in the first place at truth ; but do they aim at nothing more? If that were indeed all, then truthfulness would be the grand touchstone of suc- cess : a correct likeness of that which is most inimi- THE DRAiMA. 131 table, be it ever so base, would be tlie highest reach of art. Moreover, trutli of this kind is not peculiar to imitation ; it is needful to every art of representation alike, — imitative, narrative and musical, — otherwise, dramatic, epic and lyrical. Words do not imitate things or thoughts, but they represent things or tlioughts, and must represent them faithfully. Such truth is plainly the means to an end ; and in the arts of imitation what is that end ? Surely it is the expression of the beauti- ful. In painting and in sculpture this is evident ; and if not so evident in the drama properly so called, it is because the drama is m^ade up of a series of speeches, and speech can be turned to any purpose. A speech professing to be only a life-like copy from nature, may yet very slyly be made to insinuate certain doctrines or certain lessons ; and as some men have been endowed with that most marvellous of elfin gifts by which, with every word they let fall, a pearl or a jewel will drop from then* lips ; moreover, as such will very often be represented in the drama, it must in many cases happen that a person can never open his mouth without giving utterance to Aveighty truths. But are doctrines thus instilled essential to the drama? I trow not. For looking at dramatic speeches in their true light, as the means of imitating character and life, not as a means of as it were by slanting mirrors throwing opinions among an audience, and far less as a running commentary on the whole play, it will be seen that if they convey any- 132 THE KINDS OF POESY. thing different in kind from what may be conveyed, howeAxr feebly, by dmnb show, they swerve from dra- matic fitness, or at least are more than dramatic. These views, it is true, are at variance with the views of Schlegel, and of other Germans, — Herman Ulrici, for one, who has written a book in which he has attempted to draw the corks of all Shakespere's plays, with the intention of giving the world a taste of those moral truths which lie in them, and which, if any such wine there be, certainly ought to be very good, as not having seen the face of day for these two hundred and fifty years. I can only say in defence that although the Germans undoubtedly see further into a millstone than most men, they have, in the matter of the drama, very cheaply earned the reputation of better than Shake- spere's countrymen understanding Shakespere. They look at Shakespere, they look at the drama, from a wrong point of view. In his third lecture, Schlegel says, that to find the three kinds of poesy in their purity, we must turn to the Grgecian models ; and afterwards in the same lecture, having set forth his ideas of the classical drama, the pure idea of tragic and of comic, as he deems it, he refers to the romantic as a medley corrupt. Thus avowedly judging the drama from the stand-point of the epic drama, their views become intelligible, as it also becomes intelligible how and where they are at fault. So long as they speak of the epic drama, they are entirely in the right ; but they are so entirely astray THE DRAMA. 133 in supposing the epic drama to be the pattern drama that we are saved the necessity of following them step by step, and proving every step to be Avrong. The epic and the epic drama do indeed, in their several ways, expound the riddle of human life : the romantic drama merely exhibits life, its beauty and its grandeur, in shine, in shade, and in shower. The purposes of the stage are none other tlian the purposes of the easel — a picture of beauty ; on the canvass, a picture of lively forms, on the boards a picture of living manners. Not that everything in a picture is beautiful ; the beauty- spots of one generation may be the eyesores of another ; or perhaps, for the sake of contrast, Eaphael may set off Peter and John in the Beautiful gate of the temple by a beggar and a cripple ugliest of the ugly. If it be said that even a picture may be the means of conveying truth, there is no gainsaying the fact ; Mr Ruskin has placed it beyond all dispute in his remarks on the Imaginative Faculty. But Mr Buskin's conclu- sions may be fully admitted, while notwithstanding it may be held that truth (by truth meaning something more than mere facts, namely, the exposition, or theory, or philosophy of facts) is not written nor read in a pic- ture by virtue of any imitative or dramatic quality, but by means of some epical element either expressed or understood. Could the ass feeding on withered palm- leaves in the background of Tintoret's Crucifixion be- token to one ignorant of the history, as it betokens to 134 THE KINDS OF POESY. Ml* Ruskiiij the cause of the event portrayed ? Here is a case in point. Sir Thomas E-oe, ambassador in the time of James I. to the court of Delhi, showed to tlie Great Mogul, amongst other cm'iosities from England, a picture. It was the pictm-e of a fair and beautiful lady pulling the nose of a swarthy and ungainly mon- ster of a man. You, witli your head full of the classics, might have seen that the lady was a Venus, and that she was employing her leisure in snubbing a Satyr. But Selim Schah, having no acquaintance with Greek story, and a little knowledge of English manners, be- held things in a different light : to his eye, the lovely dame was an emblem of a nation in which the women rank above the men, and which was but lately governed by a Queen ; the gentleman bore a sort of likeness to the Orientals ; and the behaviour of madam expressed the feeling of England to the people of India. The Empe- ror was enraged, and it was Avith difficulty that lie was made aware of his mistake. He had read not the pic- ture simply, but the picture with a commentary. And a glance at the Exhibition catalogues vrill show by the quotations, long and short, added to the various titles, that almost every picture of ethical, as also of historic import, presupposes and demands some such scrolls as appear in old paintings, bearing the titles of the differ- ent personages, or some such epical prologue as opened the plays of Euripides. It will also be seen, anon, that whatever truth may be conveyed in such or in any dra- THE DRAMA. 135 matic shape, must be very trifling when compared with that which every epic can, and the higher epic always does convey. Here, observe how Shakcspere describes the drama as a picture intended to miveil all beauty, and to unmask all deformity ; " to hold as 'twere the mir- ror up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." 136 CHAPTER TIL THE EPIC. It is told of a great mathematician that he laid down the Paradise Lost inquiring what it proved. Had the poem been any but an epic, one might with a veiy good conscience join in the laugh hereupon raised against the said mathematician ; but being an epic, highest order of narrative, perhaps it will be found that he was not so very far wrong. At least, certain it is that his mathematics could not have been father to the thought, as the same opinion has been held by very different men. What if it were the offspring of com- mon sense ? For, in one shape or another, the idea is very Avide-spread, and even vulgar. Perhaps the most common form of it is the expectation of finding an alle- gory in every epic. Bossu, Frenchman though he was, could yet define the epic to be an allegory ; and time would fail us to tell of all the hidden meanings that have been discovered in the different epics. According to one interpretation of the Iliad, Agamemnon is the THE EPIC. 137 ether, Achilles the sun, Helen the earth, Paris the air, and Hector the moon. In the Dispntationes Camaldu- denses, an interesting account of which will be found in the life of Lorenzo de Medici, a couple of days are spent in showing that the ^neid envelops certain leading doctrines of the Platonic philosophy. Tasso believed that the life of the contemplative man is fig- ured in the Odyssey, and in the Divine Comedy, as the civil life is shadowed forth in the Iliad and in the ^neid 5 and having written his own Jerusalem Deliv- ered, he unfolded in a preface the allegory of the poem, the which whoso willeth may read, but shall not read here. For surely now-a-days a man bears no more liking to these gi-eat unwieldy allegories than he has a liking for what Mrs Malaprop has called the allegories on the banks of the Nile. These few examples, how- ever, will serve to show how common it has been to find a hidden treasure in epic poesy. From Callima- chus down to Cyril Jackson, it has been the use and wont of the admirers of Homer especially, to say that he is not understood, as though, like the Koh-i-nor, he were " dark with excessive bright," and must be re- illumined with the gas of our own fancies. Hence the sarcasm of Swift, that " learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew." But while, in thus hunting out allegories, critics have 138 THE KINDS OF POESY. beeu as certainly on a wrong scent as was tlie Cockney, who at a fox-hunt cried Tally-ho to a squirrel, it is equally certain that they have been guided by a sure instinct in looking for profound truth in epic poesy. The fox is there ; and it will not be difficult to unearth, it will not take long to run him down, if we can only agree as to what is a fox. What is truth ? We tell truth when we represent things as they appear to us ; and we tell truth when we represent things as they really are. All art, dramatic, epic, and lyrical, must tell truth in the former sense ; it belongs to the epic to tell truth not only in the former, but also in the latter sense. And how are things represented as they really are, but by giving an insight into the mechanism of which the outward show is the result, in other words, by tracing effects to their true causes ? In this sense, therefore, to tell truth is to show cause. Now, it may be stated generally, that a narrative, in giving facts, can and does give at the same time their causes with a constancy and a power that are as rare in the drama and in the lyric as foreign to their natures. In the drama, for instance, a dialogue is carried on, strange things are proposed, odd speeches are made, and you have no means of explanation unless from your foregone knowledge of the speakers, or from that lam- entable weakness called an aside. Narrative, on the other hand, not only gives the dialogue, but if need be can also give a clue to the cause : Shylock said so with THE EPIC. l;39 such a vieAv, and Antonio, nothing doubting, answered thus. In the lyric, it is true that tliere is not sucli an impossibility as there is in the drama of adapting the form to the exposition of cause ; but there is the greater impossibility of so adapting its spirit. The notion of cause is derived from our felt power of producing effects, and has therefore in it a self-consciousness that goes entirely against the grain of lyrical feeling. But further, to unfold the reality of things, it is not enough to make known their more immediate causes ; a thorough-going exposition of their nature will push inquiry back to their earliest beginnings, back to the source of all. The highest order of narrative, there- fore, will be stamped with this, that in showing the truth of things, it will not be content with pointing out their second causes, but will mount up to the great First Cause. Accordingly, we find that the Deity is systematically introduced into the highest epic. This has been called the machinery of tlie poem, and has been greatly misunderstood. While the French critics w^ere almost agreed in believing it to be so necessary to the epic, that unless the chief agents, the first movers, of the events are divine, the poem, whatever its otlier qualifications, is not entitled to rank with the tnie epic ; while they could stick like leeches to the saying of Petronius Arbiter, Per amhages^ Deorumqiie minisferia^ prcecipitandus est liber sjnritus^ they could yet maintain that the gods must always be heathen. Is it wonder- 140 THE KINDS OF POESY. M that other critics should have revolted from this absurdity? that Blair should have regarded the so- called machinery as very ornamental, but by no means essential ? and that Lord Kames should have gone to the extreme of asserting not simply that it gives an air of fiction to the whole poem, but even that " the end of an epic poem can never be attained in any perfection, where machinery is introduced"? And yet, with the greatest respect for Dr Hugh Blair, and for Henry Home, Lord Kames, it must be said that, whereas the French critics and the Scottish critics need make little boast of the reasons they severally bring forward, the French have on their side all the truth and all the authorities. The exhibition of the Divine agency, so far from weakening the epic, is the rock of its strength, and so far from giving an air of fiction to the story, gives even to fiction a base of reality. Not for its orna- mental beauty, not for the charms of marvel, is the unseen world uncovered; the sight is not a needless luxury ; it is a necessity, and so necessaiy, as to be the one essential out of which every other essential arises. Horace gives the advice, Nee deus intersit, nisi digiius vindice nodus Incident ; good advice in the drama ; but in the epic, gods enter for more than to cut the Gordian knots into which the threads of life may be tangled ; they enter — nay, when THE EPIC. 141 do they not enter ? And, by the way, be it observed, that the advice of Horace was given to dramatists of the epic or classic school ; could indeed at his time be given only' to such. These naturally called in the assistance of the gods, insomuch that Em'ipides, the most epic of the Greek tragedians, has been severely handled, because, true to his genius, he called the gods down oftener than the genius of the drama would allow. The drama is content to give the truth of appearance ; the epic also gives this, but at the same time lays bare the truth of reality, a truth which not seldom gives the lie to appearance. At least, the epic poet will attempt to lay it bare ; and if he is not always successful, if, with Lord Kames, we say that the gods of Homer do no honour to his poems^ we must take into account the differences of religious creed. If the Divine agency pointed out by Homer is not always to our liking, it is because we have no settled faith in his gods ; if the Divine agency pointed out by Virgil be still less to our liking, it is because not only have we small faith in his gods, but we can also see that Virgil himself had per- haps as little ; if the Divine agency pointed out by Mil- ton draws unqualified praise, it is because entirely ac- cordant with our most intimate belief,* and if another maker will come, and in keeping with the gTcat truths of Christianity, w^ill point out in whose hands the many reins of power at present lie, he shall be greeted with the heartiest welcome of all. For such, whether as 142 THE KIND8 OF POESY. connected witli the Fall of Jerusalem, or the Burning of Moscow, with a stoiy of kings, or a storj of peasants, such is the epic to be written hereafter. I close this chapter by quoting the commencements of the Iliad, of the Odyssey, and of the Paradise Lost ; as in their opening lines are struck the key-notes of the greatest epics that we know. By comparing the fifth verse of the Iliad with the seventh of the Odyssey, it may be gathered, which indeed is ti-ue, that in the for- mer poem the will of God crushes everything before it, and that in the latter, while the will of God is still almighty, the free will of man is also asserted. In the Paradise Lost, the same problem of " Fixed fate, free will, forekno^Yledge absolute," is proposed. In like manner might be cited the intro- ductions of the ^Eneid, and of the Jerusalem Delivered ; only, this would be unfair to Dante, who in the outset of his poem gives no hint of the object he has in view. Altogether, Dante's manner is strongly marked with lyricism. Not only has he chosen a measure that is constantly rising into the lyrical; his veiy choice of theme is lyrical. Peering into secrets which the living regard as future, although to the dead they hate already come, he seizes upon the last result of human life, the end-all and the be-all, and then he goes back in epic fashion to recount in one case after another the steps that led to this result. THE Eric. 143 Beginning op the Iliad. Mrjviv aetSe, ^ea, IlTJXrj'idSeQ) '^^^XtJo? ovXofievrjv, rj /xupc^ ^A')(aiol^ aXye eOrjKev, 7roX\a^v^r]v Koi voarov eracpcov aXX! ovB w? €Tapov<; eppvcraro lefievo'^ irep- avTcov yap o'(f)€Tepr}cnv araaOaXirjaLV oXovtc 144 THE KINDS OF POESY. VTfiTioi, oi Kara ySou? v7repiovo<; Hekioio TjaOiov avrap 6 Tolaiv acpeiXero voarifMOV ij/xap. Tcov afjbodev ye, ^ea, ^vyarep Alo<;, eiTve Kai tj/j^lv. Tell me the much-knowing man, Oh Muse, who to wanderings many Fared forth, after he wasted the hallowed city of Troja. Many the men whose towns he beheld and whose manners he noted ; Many the trials which he in his mind on the deep had to suffer. Seeking the prize of his life and the homeward return of his comrades. Yet not thus did he save his companions, though never so wishful ; For of their own very selves^ hy their arrogant folly, they perished, Senselessly having on beeves of the Daygod, riding in heaven, Banquetted ; wherefore the god robbed them of their day of returning. Even to us. Oh daughter of Zeus, tell somewhat of these things. Beginning of Paeadise Lost. Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat. Sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed. In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos. Or, if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God ; I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song. That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. THE EPIC. 145 And chiefly thou, O Spirit ! that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know'st : Thou from the first Was present, and with mighty wing outspread Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant : what in me is dark Illumine ! what is low raise and support ! That, to the height of this great argument, / may assert eternal providence^ And justify the ways of God to men. 146 CHAPTER IV. THE LYEIC. In the drama, outward shows are represented ; in the epic, these are represented while the hidden life is also exhibited ; in the Ijric is represented the inward life alone. Thus it will be seen that in the drama, things are shown as they appear ; in the epic, things are shown not only as they appear but also as they are ; in the lyric, things are what they seem, a perfect lyric being the perfect expression of feeling, and more than this, a perfect expression of the singer's own feeling. The highest IjTic is never imitative. Great Ijaics have in- deed been wi'itten from a dramatic point of view, and perhaps in these romantic times the greater number have been so written. Seldom is Tennyson more dra- matic than when he is most lyrical ; dramatic in the sense of giving utterance to the supposed poetry of an- other, as well as in the sense of giving utterance to the supposed feelings of another : so that although he has wi'itten no regular di'ama, though he has reared no single THE LYRIC. 147 edifice of this kind to be compared with the palaces of an avowed dramatist, still his various pieces may be arrang- ed, like the various houses of a town, into a mass of building not unworthy of a great dramatist. Here he builds a house for Shelley, here for Wordsworth, here for Coleridge, here for himself, here for the monks, here for the knights, here for the ladies. Such also is the char- acter of most of our lyrical poesy, lyrical in form, imi- tative in conception ; another illustration of the drama- tism of Christian art. And it is for this reason that the English have so signally failed in the. lyric that you can almost count on the fingers of one hand all the songs in the English language that are w^orthy of the name, at least, all those written by Englishmen. The English poets, whose stronghold has ever been the drama, where truly they have outshone all rivalry, have the dramatic rage so strong that they dramatize the lyric, singing in every character but their own. Or perhaps I should say the very reverse ; that it is not because of their excellence in the drama that they are weak in the lyric ; but because they dread the open- heartedness of a lyric that they take refuge in the drama : not w^illing to sing in their own characters, they will sing for any and everybody else. However this be, it is plain enough that the English lyric is dramatic, that there lies its weakness, and that this weakness is fatal. There are drinking-songs by tee- totallers who trespass in ginger-beer; love-songs by 148 THE KINDS OF POESY. men to whom love is a jest ; home-songs by bachelors who live at their clubs ; work-songs by the veriest idlers ; hmiting-songs by those whose noblest game have been rats and mice, and such small deer ; war-songs by gentle ladies ; sea-songs by landsmen who get sick in crossing a river ; matin-songs by sluggards who never saw the sun rise ; vespers by good fellows to whom evening is the beginning of the day ; mad-songs by men who are never in a passion ; and sacred-songs by men who are never in a church. Scottish lyrics, on the other hand, express the gen- uine sentiments of the individual singer ; and hence their superiority. The Scottish poets have not been afraid to commit themselves by a show of feeling ; the English poets have. Even of such a public virtue as patriotism the Englishman is often very slow to make confession ; and yet no one is prouder of his fatherland. After the manner of Balaam the son of Beor, he gives a blessing to nations that he cordially hates ; and his love for England gushes forth in words of reviling, if not in some dreadful malison. ^' England ! with all thy faults, I love thee still," says Cowper ; and then he goes on to enumerate her faults, without mentioning a single excellence, only hinting at English mind and manners ; stilly he says, as though it were a hard job, he will manage to love his country. How truly Eng- lish ! and how different from the ^' Kule Britannia," of Thomson ; from the ^' Ye Mariners," of Campbell ; THE LYRIC. * 149 from Scott's burst of enthusiasm when addressing tlie " Land of brown heath and shaggy wood" ; from Beattie, even from Bjron, at least when he sings of Scotland^ and above all, from Burns. The songs of Burns owe their success to this egotism, this person- ality, this outpoming of the inmost soul which the English avoid as they do the confessional. In his Essay on Burns, perhaps of all his compositions the most thoroughly beautiful, Carlyle would lay the suc- cess of those lyrics to the account of their sincerity ; which indeed comes to the same thing. It is the same reason stated less formally, and more, if not too, strongly. Why should a man be charged with insincerity for avowedly expressing the feelings of another, not his own feelings ? It is surely enough to say that he is a dramatist, — a bad dramatist, if you will ; and that he has utterly mistaken the meaning of a lyric in suppos- ing that it can well be dramatic, or can be other than the perfect expression of the singer's personality. How keenly is this felt in sacred songs ! When from hear- say, or from a busier tell-tale, the poem itself, we have any misgiving that it has been written by a man to whom religious feeling is strange ; that, in short, it is dramatic in spirit, lyrical only in form, how impossible does it become to sing that song save with the mouth. If it was deemed becoming in the early Italian painters, (dramatists as they were) that they should lead a strictly religious life, much more is it meet that he, whose 150 THE KINDS OF POESY. hymns would ever caiTj like doves to the ear of God the messages of men, should so attune his life that his hymns being ascertained to have come from heaven, it may be assuredly felt that thither also they return. This brings us to the leading idea of the present kind of poesy. The higher lyric is not less religious than the higher epic. But there is this difference betwixt the two, that whereas the epic begins with God, the lyric ends with God. The epic sees in God the first cause of all things ; the lyric sees in God the ultimate end of all things. The lyric is an aspiration ; its ban- ner has the strange device, Excelsior. It is a prayer for good to come, while it is seen afar like a ship seen by a castaway ; or it is the praise of good enjoyed with the assurance that it will last pmd grow better still ; or it is a lament for good flown, with the hope that it may soon return, as birds return in the summer. This in every drinking-song ; this in Anacreon as well as in King David ; but the higher lyric recognises God as the only and sovereign good, and rightly so. '^ Rightly so: can there be any doubt of the fact?" I do not suppose that there can be any doubt of God's being the only and all good ; but it has been doubted whether even the best of men are ever so miselfish as to see in God the last end of their being. What is or ought to be the last or chief end of man ? With the Westmin- ster Assembly of Divines we all answer : '' Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever." To THE LYRIC. 151 that answer, however, we may give two very different interpretations. Our own happiness, and what is theo- logically termed the glory of God ; our own pleasure and the pleasure of God are one ; but which is our ulti- mate end ? Do we seek to please God for the sake of our own happiness ? or do we secure our own happiness while endeavouring after God? The latter, I think. For, in exhibiting the third law of pleasure, I attempted to prove, and whether proven or not proven, whether paradoxical or not paradoxical, it is true that man can- not be happy in seeking his own happiness. Man is happy only, then, when he pursues an object apart from himself; and he is happy in God only when he gives himself up to God with utter self-forgetfulness. The higher lyric is therefore justified in regarding God, not our own happiness, as to us the sovereign good. As God is the unfathomable beginning of all things ; so likewise He is not only the end beyond which there is no end, but is also accounted such by his creatures. It will be seen that this idea of God is vitally con- nected with that of Immortality. The notion of Immor- tality in fact involves such an idea of God, not as being the Eternal Cause, the lost beginning of all things, but as the end-all and the be-all, an everlasting conse- quence, effect producing effect, producing effect far be- yond ken of human thought. The Englisli free-think- ers of last century felt that they could escape from the bugbear of Immortality, if they could only sliow to the 152 THE KINDS OF POESY. idea of God a door out of the universe. Some one replied, Not quite so fast, good sirs ! you have not yet got rid of Immortality ; since, if chance "brought you into this particular world, why then, at death, chance may also send you to the bottomless pit, and keep you there for ever. The retort was fair enough, and a good argumentum ad homines ; but of course, without resting on the idea of God, we can conceive our Immortality no more than our creation. The subject of this part is resumed in the latter por- tion of Book Fourth. PART SECOND. THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. CHAPTER I. GENEEAL. Eoscius challenged Cicero to express his ideas by spoken language faster and more clearly than he him- self could by gesture ; and cases without number will occur to every mind where feeling, in coming to the surface, finds, and ever has found for its expression, means far more eloquent than words. Properly, there- fore, the art of poesy should consider any and eveiy expression whereby man has been able to unbm'den his mind of poetic feeling, whether in so doing he transfers that load to the bosom of another, or with no eye, no ear to witness, launches it on the passing breeze. That woman who, when the Western Highlands of Scotland were visited, as Ireland was about the same time, with 154 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. a dearth so great, so awful, that in the memory of man nothing like it had been seen, in the proud spirit of independence bj which the clansmen are generally marked, chose rather than ask for the food which had been sent thither by the charity of the lowland towns, to go without nourishment for days together, but at length when overcome by suffering, and almost starved to death, drew nigh to where the almoners were dealing- out their bounty, and ashamed to beg, only bared her arm, and lifted it up to show how lank and slirivelled it had become ; she, little as she thought of art, was in the same sense in which we may so call any poet who pours forth unpremeditated strains — an artist. Here, we confine ourselves to the artistic employment of words. That the poet is of imagination all compact every one will readily admit. But in what way his peculiar faculty works, and, above all, how it outvfardly be- tokens its presence in language, have long been mooted. Most people have felt and believed Verse to be the dis- tinguishing trait of poetic utterance; while a few have maintained that verse is quite a secondary matter, and that the true shibboleth is Imagery. Aristotle seems to say that an Epopee may be com- posed either in prose (-v/rtXot? Xo'ycf?, bare words) or in metre ; and he afterwards roundly declares as much as that a writer — Empedocles — may have the musical gift of a Homer, and yet have nothing else in common Avhich may entitle him to the name of poet. Other GENERAL. 155 writers regard verse as equally accidental. Sismondi holds, that at first it was merely a help to the memoiy • and Mr Disraeli, in the preface to his Wondrous Tale of Alroy, while he puts in a salvo for the lower form of verse, commonly called rhythmical prose, says the very same of the higher forms, that they ^rere merely the aids of memory, the offspring of an unlettered age, and that they are no longer needed by us who commit every- thing to paper. Wordsworth likewise, in the appendix to a very celebrated preface, affirms, that ^^ metre is but adventitious to composition ;" and Coleridge says, that it is '^ simply a stimulant of the attention," which, if true, would render all his other theories very needless, and which is at once seen to be false when placed be- side the parallel theory of a French writer, Cerceau by name, who maintained that the inversion of its gram- mar is all that distinguishes the verse from the prose of his countrymen, and that this inversion is but a stimu- lant. Even those who, like Archbishop Whately, con- sider verse to be an essential of poesy, have never shown on satisfying grounds why it should be so; they have never shown the necessity by which the ex- pression of poetic feeling becomes metrical. Had we to choose between Verse and Imagery, the former is certainly the more worthy badge of a poet, and it is also the more searching test ; because while imposing imagery can be supplied to any extent by mechanical rule, if not by native impulse, none but a 156 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. tme poet can send forth a strain that will " vibrate in the memory." No one can move his lips in the heat of inspiration without moving harmonious numbers. Every thought that he breathes will draw music from language as from a wind-harp, else it is not the breath of heaven, nor of heavenly powers. When the answers of the Priestess of Apollo were couched in prose, as they some- times were, and from the time of Pyrrhus always were delivered, it was a proof that inspiration had departed from the Pythia. And should any man who is a poet divorce his thoughts from music, and be content ha- bitually to send them forth in prose, he hath sundered what God hath joined. If Carvilius Spurius was known and hated at Rome as the first of all the Romans who divorced his wife, and who divorced her for being childless, be assured that Plato, the first on record who forsook poesy for prose, would be remembered in like manner, had he not otherwise redeemed his fame, and had we not been averse from visiting literary sins with the indignation due to moral ofiences. But in truth we are not called upon to make a choice between the two. Both have their rights, both are to be accepted. Verse and Imagery, the sacramental mysteries of poesy, are twin-born. They come to us together ; we must keep them and explain them together. The three laws of poetry take part in the genesis of both these forms ; but the first law takes the chief part. Since poetry passes through the imagination to and GENERAL 157 from the soul of man, it is perfect or imperfect accord- ing as it adapts itself more or less to the forms of that faculty. But since the imagination is a copy of sense its forms must be those of its pattern. Now, according to Kant's analysis, the leading forms of sense, under which everything is perceived, are Time and Space. These, therefore, belong to the imagination. It follows, that whatever comes naturally and freely from the ima- gination will be, and that whatever would touch it powerfully must be, moulded by these forms. Poesy therefore, or, since speech is a sensuous faculty, we may say language generally, as it nears perfection, will own these forms more or less entirely. It will bring out the idea of Time by the use of timed or measured words, and it will fulfil the idea of Space by means of imagery. 158 CHAPTER 11. VEESE. The idea of time is so very simple, that it seems im- possible to find for it any but a verbal explanation. A very common way, indeed, is to speak of time and tliink of space. Thus we say, length and space of time ; thus also, Hobbes, with his wonted self-con- fidence, attempting to outdo Aristotle in a definition of time, says, that it is ^' the phantasm of before and after in motion," (Elements of Philos. Chap. 7), thereby defining space quite as well as time. It is equally baffling to ex- plain how time is expressed well and fitly by an orderly succession of beats ; yet we cannot doubt the fact. We also know, that whether we give way freely and uncon- sciously to present excitement, or attempt to recall past feelings or actions as vividly and perfectly as possible, we always have recourse to modulated expressions. Thus a child will dance for joy, and when learning his lesson will unwittingly swing his body to and fro, in order to bring his most powerful faculty — the imagi- VERSE. 150 nation — into play. If a man speed in his labour, he begins to hum a tune ; if his thoughts are very livelily engaged, he will beat time with his fingers or with his feet. In the north of Scotland there was a lady, now there no longer, who, unable to kneel down, was always known to be at prayer when she patted on tlic table with her hand. There also, as among the Quakers in England, prayer, when it becomes fervid, rises into a low and not unpleasing chant ; which indeed is none other than that intonation, sometimes sinking into a mere whine or twang, for which the Puritans were of old, and tlie Puseyites are now remarkable, the former in the use of improvised, the latter in the use of pre- meditated, litanies. The same practice may be ob- served in addresses to man as well as in addresses to God. Evelyn tells us (1665, Feb. 24) that the well- known Dr Fell — the same who was hated with some pretensions to rhyme, but with none whatever to reason — delivered his discourses in blank verse ; a report which, with some allowance for tare, is credible enough. For, while many speeches are delivered that keep no time, the voice of an impassioned speaker, however harsh and broken its first utterance may be, will soon flow into waves and roll along in ever-swelling billows —(which the Greeks acknowledged and acted on so fully, that sometimes they went the length of scanning a remarkable sentence) ; and a poor speaker will me- chanically try to reach the same effect by lifting his 160 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. voice into an nnclianging sing-song, ding-dong, that might easily be mistaken for an attempt at blank verse, the blank verse, at least, of the drama, which, as the Paradise Lost was not published till two years after Evelyn made the entry in his jomiial, was the only kind at that time known. Perhaps it is not too much to say, and Coleridge, I believe, has said something to the same effect, that the music of any speech is a test of its value. The most seemingly nonsensical music that I can think of, is The House that Jack built ; yet, on looking more narrowly, we shall there find a great truth, how nothing in the world stands apart by itself, brought do^vn to a child's understanding by tracing the links which connect the rat of one parish with the cock of another. And the music, such as it is, agrees in character with the sense which it conveys. No single line strikes the ear, or hits the fancy j but as a whole the effect is so pleasing, that not the most learned pun- dit of us all can desire it to be forgotten. Everything we do, then, everything we think of, takes or has taken place in time ; and the imagination lays hold of that fact in whatever it seizes. Time we represent to ourselves as an orderly succession of some kind. Although we reckon it by suns, moons, tides, and other objective standards, its real value with every man is subjective, what is long to one being short to another ; and this value is found in the more or less rapid succession of thought. The measure of time, VERSE. 161 therefore, which the imagination will provide, is not a uniform beat, like that of a clock, but one like the pulse, varying according to circumstances. Even this, however — this throbbing — gives but a faint semblance of the manner in which ideas of time are conveyed by the modulations of verse. Time is noted by something more than the number and the length of pauses and of sounds ; it is unconsciously and very subtly, but not the less truly, noted by the quality of sounds as deter- mined by accent. Accent depends on the sharpness of a tone. Mr Guest stops us here : he says (English Rhythms, B. L, Chap. IV.) that it depends on no such thing, but on increased loudness of tone. According to his own showing, however, the rhythm, that is, the music of English verse depends upon accent ; and therefore, if the essential of accent be an increase of loudness, it must follow that the melody of English verse depends on the relative loudness of its sounds — a camel not to be swallowed. Mr Guest allows that in almost every instance there is with the accent an increased sharpness of tone ; but two reasons, formidable as those lions that guarded the palace Beautiful, prevent his going further — prevent his believing sharpness of tone to be the essential of accent. The first lion roars in broad Scotch, and when you take the weaver's word, and say, " Let him roar again, let him roar again," the second lion begins to " aggravate his voice," and " roars you as 162 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. gently as any sucking clove" — in a very whisper. The latter says : '^ In a whisper there can be neither gi'avity nor sharpness of tone, as the voice is absent ; yet even in a whisper the rhythm of a verse may be distinctly traced;" ergo, the rhythm cannot depend on sharpness. When Mr Guest says that the rhythm may be traced, he means that we may catch not only the order of the accents, which is very true, but also their nature, which is not true. In maintaining this, he begs the whole question. The best part of rhythm is not to be found in a whisper, whose feeble imitation is indeed no more to be compared with the utterance of the voice than is the orderly array of sounds which a girl elicits, when, ac- cording to wont, she plays upon some imaginary key- board on the table, to be compared with the same array of sounds when she plays it upon the real key-board of the pianoforte. Xext, hearken to the Scottish Lion : ^' The Scots give to the accented syllable a grave tone. Now, if our English accent consisted merely in sharp- ness of tone it would follow, that in the mouth of a Scotchman our accents would be misplaced. This, however, is not so : the accents follow in their proper place, and our verses still keep their rhythm, though pronounced with the strange intonations of a Fifeshire dialect." It is about as difficult to say a verse well, as to sing it well ; there is in either case the same bright stream of sound, but flowmg with less of rapidity, and less of gurgling, in the one case than in the other. VERSE. 163 Poets — James Thomson among the number — have been unable to repeat their own compositions : the Troubadours often engaged a Jongleur to recite their chanzos and their sirventes. Yet Mr Guest will judge of English verse from the way that children read it ; for certainly, neither in England nor in Scotland — not even in the East Neuk o' Fife — will any man with two ears read with only one accent ; he will employ both the one and the other according as the sense requires. This, however, makes nothing against the reasoning : it only supplies a weightier fact. But the reasoning, if it be worth anything against the common theory of sharpness, is worth as much against his own theory of loudness. For, if attention be paid to the ticking of a clock, a veiy marked accentuation will be discovered. Now, it is well known, that we hear the stress not always when the pendulum reaches the same end of its arc, but at this end, or at that end, w^e hear it, according to the moment when we begin to listen. This cannot be the result of increased loudness. The accent is changed, while no change whatever has been wrought in the sounds. It must, therefore, be ideal. It is an ideal stress given, not to increased sharpness, nor to increased loudness, nor to increased length of sound, but to a change — of Avhich kind we cannot say from the above experi- ment, yet is there no reason to doubt the common opi- nion, that it is to a change of sharpness. It is not, however, to be forgotten, that difference of sharpness 164 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. will also affect the loudness and the length of tones. An acute sound is naturally louder than a grave one ; a gTave one is longer lived. When we set out on this petty skirmish^ from which now a retreat must be sounded, it was on the point of being shown that verse can impress ideas of time in an- other and finer manner, than by the length and number of its syllables, and of the pauses between. A verse depends upon the order and the nature of its accents. There is no good ground for withstanding the common doctrine, that accent depends on the relative sharpness of tones. Their sharpness depends upon time ; upon the number of their vibrations in a given time. And thus at bottom, music is sound expressing divisions and infinitesimal subdivisions of time. These we may not be able to trace knowingly ; but they have their effect. Such, then, is metre in its simplest form — time heard. And it will show the importance of metre to remark, that time is heard rather than felt in any other way. It is noted by the ear more and better than by any other sense, while space, again, is best and chiefly marked by the eye. It matters nothing whether these powers be acquired or inborn. Let Berkeley's Theory of Vision, which has hitherto been a law so ci-uel to the dogmatic, and a gospel so pleasing to the sceptical philosophers of this country, stand fast as ever, and let Sir Da^dd Brewster, who has so boldly and so power- fully assailed it, be deemed in the wrong ; it is never- VERSE. 165 theless true, that now, at least, however it may have been with each of us originally, time is mainly heard, and space mainly seen. It is, indeed, on this account, that sight and hearing stand apart from the other senses. All their revelations have a greater outness, a greater sensuous reality, than can otherwise be found ; and are truly entitled to the name of perceptions, whereas those of the other senses very seldom amount to more than sensations. For why? Because these two of our five wits have grasped most firmly those forms upon which sensuous reality depends — time and space. But while these twain stand aloof from the other senses, and above them, there is also a wide dif- ference between the parts which they themselves per- form in art. As in Sculpture only the idea of space is wrought out, so in Music only that of time ; and as in Painting both space through form and time through colour are depicted, greater prominence, however, being given to the former, so in Poesy, ideas both of space and of time are conveyed, but especially of the latter. There time is presented, space is only represented to the mind. Metre appeals to the ear, imagery appeals only to the mind's eye. This will show the relative importance of the two. In now ^turning to examine how the second law of poetry, the law of harmony, tells upon versification, we are at once met with an inquiry which deserves our at- tention. 166 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. The imagination is sometimes called the mind's eye. Though this be a narrower term, including but one class of mental representations, and requiring to be sup- plemented with others, such as mind's ear, it is the widest of the kind, and is here alluded to as a proof stamped in the language, if any proof be needed, that the imagination is chiefly employed with ideas derived from sight. But metre is addressed to quite another sense. How then comes it that concords, with which the mind's eye has chiefly to do, should be expressed by concords which the bodily ear can alone perceive ? We advance a step to the answering of this question by stating its converse — how is it that we can think and speak of music as hrilliantf In the Reliques of Ancient Poetry there is a song to the Lute, which both for its own sake, and for the mention made of it in Romeo and Juliet, every reader of Percy must have carefully conned. When Peter in the play catches at one of the lines, and inquires why silver souiid ? why music with her silver sound ? almost every one will feel that the phrase is rather of a puzzle. Some perhaps will side with Simon Catling when he replies — Because silver hath a sweet sound ; and if another who knows' well that an answer may be shallow, and yet go to the bottom, should notwithstanding declare that this does not so much as skim the top, but that, in good sooth, the word stands for shining, and the line means music silver-bright of sound^ they will perhaps deem his an- VERSE. 167 swer as lame, without the excuse of being a tithe so pleasant, as those of Hugh Kebeck and of Peter himself who siiy that it is used because musicians sound for sil- ver, and seldom have gold for sounding, and will think it still worse than the silence of ^Ir Soundpost. But what if it turn out that such is the tnie answer ? Bacon asks if the quavering upon a stop in music be not the same as the playing of light upon water, and gives this as an instance of those resemblances in nature (to be more fully described hereafter, in treating of simile) which are something more than resemblances, which are in fact identities, the same foot-prints of nature traced in different soils. No one who has ever found that when looking at anything shiny — say when his eye is dazzled by a bit of glass far afield giving back the sunbeam, he feels as though his ear were at the same time struck w4th some shrill and piercing cry, will be at a loss for Bacon's meaning ; nor will he fail to enter into that olden faith which heard music in the stars, and beheld the lord of music in the lord of day. And now the effects of light are no longer explained by the Newtonian theory of rays, but by the Huyghenian theory of waves ; the same theory that explains the effect of sound. Assuming therefore that the shows both of light and of sound affect us according to the selfsame laws, may we not hereby understand how sight and hearing should be so connected in our minds that we speak of the one as of the other, and record 168 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. the agreeableness of visionary delight hy the harmonies of audible ? In examining how the law of harmony acts upon metre, we must beware of a mistake to which we are very liable. We are to distinguish between harmony and the love of hamiony. The harmony of which men- tion has been made is a concord subsisting between the subjective and the objective, between the mind and the objects of its thought : the love of harmony is a de- light in the discovery of such or of any concord, of the concord among sounds, or of that between sound and sense. When by the first law of poetry, that is, by a necessity of the imagination, a timed or tuned expres- sion is required, the nature of the concord struck be- tween self and unself (in plain English, the sense) will determine a particular movement in the verse, and be satisfied with nothing else ; but the love of harmony is pleased with any and every music, now with namby- pamby, again with the Alexandrine, and it ensures no- thing, unless to insist that the connexion between the inward concord and the outward melody shall be well marked, thus only enforcing what is ot]ler^^dse impera- tive. It will be found, indeed, that those who like Aristotle refer verse to the love of melody, make it the hireling, or at best the adopted child of poesy, and not its true offspring. In a highly cultivated age, the mere love of melody — a musical ear — will no doubt produce many a song, but it is not the original cause of song VERSE. 169 any more than is that love of feasting — that dainty palate — which will induce an epicure to eat much and often, the original cause of eating. It may be stated generally, that the effect of the pre- sent law upon the time or tune engendered by the first will be to prolong and repeat the strain, so as to impart its own self-complacency to the outward form. This remark may appear vague, but if accepted in the meantime, it will be rendered more definite in the se- quel. It may also be stated that, although rhyme of itself be accidental, yet when it does come into play, it is at this stage. By rhyme is here meant any chime or assonance that makes a rhythmical movement more marked, and especially that marks its close — the dac- tyl and spondee, for instance, which closes the hexa- meter line, and which also closes the Sapphic stanza. There is one way of linking metre to the present law which is in favom- with some, which is indeed a very good way so far as it goes, but which is an utter failure when, as commonly happens, it claims, in virtue of this success, to be the only true and perfect theory of versification. Metre is regarded as an obedience to, and the expression of, law as law. Bacon regards it as a cm-b or shackle where everything else is riot and law- less revelling,* Wordsworth regards it as a mark of order, and so an assurance of reality, needed in such an unusual and irregular state of the mind as he takes poetry to be; and Coleridge would trace it to the 170 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. balance struck between our passions and spontaneous efforts to bold tbem in cbeck. Tbe working of tbe law as tbus understood may be seen pretty clearly in Keble. He and those with whom he is supposed to think, speak and act in common, dwell so fondly on the duty and advantages of not obeying laws found in or by our- selves, but of yielding to the yoke laid on, and follow- ing the path pointed out by motherly and ghostly hands, that it is fair to conclude they both find the benefit, and are in the habit, of so doing. And this very thing, the benefit as well as the habit, we see in Keble's verse. For whenever he invents a measure of his own, it is almost sure to be in itself uncouth, and to be the bearer of thoughts either commonplace, or very quaint ; but, on the other side, when the metre is ready made to his hand, acknowledged and accustomed, it is for the most part gifted with a large dowry of those charms that have endeared his Ip'ics to thousands upon thousands in our country, and have rendered his name a household and a hearthold thing to those even who on some points are very far from seeing with him eye to eye. The theory as thus far explained may be regarded as part and parcel of the second law of poetry ; it is that restj which was described as belonging to the second law of pleasure, stilling the motion of the first, — rest in the midst of motion. We shall obtain a more thorough enunciation of the same idea under the third law, which VEESE. 171 indeed is but a development of the second. In tliis ex- planation I must take the freedom of attaching meta- physical to physical ideas. Rest and motion are phy- sical conceptions ; but as we are to determine the nature of this combined rest and motion, we must descend to physical ideas that are still more definite. Licuit, sem- perque licebit. When the mind in poetic mood is said to work un- consciously, it is not meant that self-consciousness is utterly extinct. If so, we were dead or in a swoon. We are always tied to self-consciousness and unable to escape, but we fly away from it as far as we can. Our thoughts would fain break away from time and wander through eternity, would leave the earth and soar through the unbounded heaven, would forget self altogether and be lost in the Divine. But because we cannot do so entirely ; because, being held by a chain, there are limits beyond which we cannot go, if our minds on reaching these limits still retain the activity which car- ried them thither, the path which they describe — to speak mathematically — must needs be circular. (Per- haps it was in some such sense as this that Lorenz Oken defined self-consciousness to be a living ellipse.) And what the effect ? The centrifugal force wherewith the mind rushes forth into the objective, acting on the cen- tripetal force of self-consciousness, generates the circling numbers, the revolving harmonies of poesy — in one word, a roundelay. Thus the fine mechanism of verse goes 172 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. round, wheel upon wheel, and wheel within wheel. Clement of Rome beautifully says, that the Spirit of God is sent forth {tva pvOfjirjay tov<; alcovaShe Began to address us and was moving on In gratulation, till as when a boat Tacks, and her slackened sail flaps, all her voice / Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried / ' :My brother.' " / But the difference between an improper and an allow- able freedom of this kind will be seen in what follows from the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher : " More foul distempers than ere yet the hot JSun bred through his burnings, ichile the dog Pursues the raging lion^ VERSE. 187 And surely there must be something radically wronc; in the mode of printing, when, as in the rhyme of Endy- mion, and in blank verse generally, the exception becomes the rule. Johnson quotes approvingly a saying, that blank verse is verse only to the eye. It is not a true saying, it is only a poor cousin of the truth. Blank verse is verse to the eye, and it makes music to the ear ; but the verse which comes to the ear is not that which meets the eye. It should not be written nor printed in the common way : it should be penned and printed like Thalaba. Here is the opening of that poem, ^nrit- ten after no such arabesque fashion as Southey sup- posed, but according to plain sense : " How beautiful is night ! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain Breaks the serene of heaven ; In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine Rolls through the dark blue depths ; Beneath her steady ray The desert circle spreads. Like the round ocean girdled with the sky. How beautiful is night ! " This much admired passage has the true melody of blank verse, and it may be so written, without any very deadly sin to trouble our consciences : " How beautiful is night ! A dewy fresh- Ness fills the silent air ; no mist obscures, Nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain breaks the serene Of heaven ; in full-orbed glory yonder moon 188 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. Divine — rolls through the dark blue depths ; beneath Her steady ray the desert circle spreads, Like the round ocean girdled with the sky. How beautiful is night ! But what is hereby gained? There is often as little pause between two words which are written in different lines as between the two syllables oi fresh-ness ; and those who are content that the idea of a line should thus be made a sham^ need no longer quan'el with " the water gra- El at or absent from the U- Niversity of Gottingen." 189 CHAPTER III, IMAGERY. At the end of his treatise on the Art of English Poesy, Puttenham gives a list of those figures of speech which in the body of his work he had examined one by one : " Eclipsis or the figure of default ; zeugma, or the single supply 5 prozeugma, or the ringleader ; mesozeugma, or the middle-marcher ; hypozeugma, or the rereward- er ; syllepsis, or the double supply ; hypozeuxis, or the substitute ; aposiopesis, or the figure of silence, otherwise called the figure of interruption 5 prolepsis, or the propounder ; hyperbaton, or the trespasser ; paren- thesis, or the insertor ; hysteron-proteron, or the prepos- terous ; enallage, or figure of exchange ; hypallage, or the changeling; homoioteleton, or the figure of likeloose ; parimion, or figure of likeletter ; asindeton, or figure of lose language ; polysindeton, or the couple clause ; irmus, or the long loose ,* epitheton, or the qualifier ; endiades, or the figure of twins ; . . " The list is interesting as an attempt to render into English the Greek names employed in rhetoric; and as thus tar 190 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. copied, it is remarkable as being but a tenth part of the whole. Here of course we may not enter into such de- tail, and neither may we encumber ourselves with those figures which are merely figm-es of speech. We have to do only with such as may be classed under the general name of Imagery. It has already been shown (p. 157) that verse and imagery are evolved at once and together from the first law of poetry, the law of imagination ; and that as the primary object of the former is to express time, so the primary object of the latter is to denote place. I speak of place in the widest sense of the word, be it piu:e space, be it locality or geographical place, be it shape or form, that is, defined and figured place. By imagery many seem especially to understand similitude ; and it would seem to be a common opinion that rich and rare similitudes form the peculiar device of poesy. They form indeed a splendid ornament, and for the purpose which they serve are invaluable. That distinguishing purpose will be unfolded in treating of imagery as developed by the second law of poetry, and as employed in epic poesy ; but it must here be re- marked that, although similes can and do in their own way further the object of the first law, namely, in re- presenting place to the mind, they are by no means essential to that end. A few examples may be given to show how, without similitude or metaphor, the idea of place may be thus conveyed to the mind. IMAGERY. 191 There is a certain class of comparisons (called long- tailed by a French writer) in which, after the illustra- tion has been run out, and when we should expect the poet to say no more about it, since it is no longer paral- lel, he yet dwells on it, and follows it seemingly for its own sake. Undoubtedly this will sometimes happen from the poet's being unable to stop himself, and in such a case he is finely exposed to the torments of the critic ; but even the scrupulous critics of the last cen- tury found it in their hearts to defend the license. Johnson rightly defended it, because of its helping to fill the imagination. It affords no similitude, but it scoops out a place whereinto another picture may enter. Again : Wordsworth has a habit, peculiar I believe to himself and to but one other poet, of laying out the mind as so much ground ; and he does this (always ad- mirably) sometimes with and sometimes without a de- cided metaphor. The haunt and main region of his song is the human mind ; he beholds throughout na- ture a presence whose dwelling is, among o\h^Y places mentioned, the mind of man ; his heart is housed with- in a dream ; a sound carries the mountains far into the heart of the Windermere boy ; nature is at the heart of Peter Bell. AYere my words a thousandfold weightier than they are, and were the fact a hundred times more important than it happens to be, it can take nothing from that noble meed of praise which Wordsworth has now at length won for himself, and had well earned 192 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. from the very beginning, to say what does, I think, les- sen very considerably the force of those critical remarks which he has written to the hurt of Ossian, that in at- taining these wonderful effects he owes not a little to the very work which he has brought before his judg- ment-seat to condemn so unmercifully. His treatment of this manner is very masterly, and certainly an im- provement on that of Ossian ; yet to show its frequency with the latter, I will quote only the instances that oc- cur in the first piece of that collection which goes under his name. " Deaths wander like shadows over his fiery soul ;" ^' Grief is dwelling in his soul 5" " White hand- ed daughter of grief, a cloud marked with streaks of fire, is rolled along thy soul ;" '' The son of Starno dwells lonely in my soul." Without as well as w^ith similitude, the mind here becomes a part of space. Often the very denial of similitude is highly poetic, and afibrds a clearer and broader conception of space than were it affirmed. What a vast reach does the fol- lowing remarkable verse of Xenophanes open up ! eU ^eo9 ev re ^eolai Kai uv6p(£>iroLai /jLejLaTO<;' ovre Se/ia<; ^vrjTolaiv 6/j.oilo<;, ovre vorjfia. One God only there is ; He greatest of gods and of mankind ; Like unto mortals neither in body, nor yet in idea. And who that has read can have forgotten those mar- vellous words of Christopher North : " The airy anthem IMAGERY. 193 came floating over our couch, and then alighted with- out footsteps among the heather ? " Without any similitude, the idea of phace is some- times presented in a very forcible manner by a change of time. The line in which Keats hints at an event which has yet to take place, as if it had already taken place, must be well known : — " So the two brothers and their murdered man Eocle past fair Florence." This, however, is but a skilful adaptation of a very common phrase, '• We be all dead men." Keble has something more uncommon in that little poem on Lilies, which, if not the most powerful, is perhaps the most touching and beautiful that even he has w^ritten : — " Ye dwell beside our paths and homes, Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow, And guilty man, where'er he roams. Your innocent mirth may borrow. The birds of air before us fleet. They cannot brook our shame to meet, But we may taste your solace sweet, And come again to-morrow." How" finely? kow suddenly by the change of time, in the last word of the stanza, from any morrow to the morrow of this day, are we landed into the very spot where he is standing, and in the twinkling of an eye showai everything around ! An unexpected turn of the same kind will be found in Hooker : ^^ Whatsoever we know, we have it by the hands and ministry of men, 194 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. which lead us along like children from a letter to a syllable, from a syllable to a word, from a word to a line, from a line to a sentence, from a sentence to a side, avid so turn over.''' The passage will have a more prosaic, and perhaps the true rendering, bj taking the last verb for the present indicative ; but it first strikes one that the verb is an imperative, and that we are bidden turn over. In this case, the effect would be wrought by a change, not of time, but of mood. By the Attic poets the imperative is very often used for like service, al- though, for the most part, in a manner quite untrans- latable. Yet again, the use of mere rhyme will sometimes give height, or depth, or length, or breadth, as the case may be, to om* conception of place. In rhyme, it is very difficult to describe the grand ; yet Sir Walter Scott masters, nay triumphs over, the difficulty by mul- tiplying the rhymes till they become monotonous ; and almost aWays, when he has to describe any thing afar, or w^idely spreading, he will chime fom', five, and even six times. With what wonderful skill does he send Edin- burgh into the distance, wdien, describing it from Black- ford Hill, he employs the rhymes, first, like so many milestones to mark off the length of way, and then, after reaching the distant city, measuring it up and dow^n with the same broad line : — " Still on the spot Lord Marmion stayed, For fairer scene he ne'er surveyed. IMAGERY. 195 When sated with the martial show, That peopled all the plain below, The wandering eye might o'er it go, And mark the distant city glow With gloomy splendour red ; For on the smokewi-eaths huge and slow, That round the sable turrets flow, The morning beams were shed, And tinged them with a lustre proud Like that which streaks a thunder cloud." Yarj or banish altogether the above rhymes, and the effect is spoilt. Another fine instance of the same is the description of Loch Coriskin ; in the opening lines of which his fancy ranges over broad Scotland, seeking out the barrenest glens, ' and in them for the scanty footprints of vegetation j and then falling back on the still more barren isle, he finishes, as none but a master can, a picture which in every touch, from first to last, is perfect : — " The wildest glen but this can show Some touch of nature's genial glow ; On high Benmore the mosses grow, The heathbells bud in deep Glencoe, And copse on Cruachan Ben ; But here, nor tree, nor shrub, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power, The wearied eye ma)^ ken^ For all is rocks at random thrown. Huge crags, bare blocks and banks of stone." Another way of perfecting the idea of place, without making use of similitude, is by entering into detailed description, such as Crabbe is so fond of employing ; 196 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. and there are yet other ways. The foregoing exam- ples, however, are more than enough to show how, nn- der this first law of poesy, space may be cleared out before the mind's eye without as well as with a simile. In thus showing how the idea of place may be con- veyed, I have dwelt npon the fact, that comparison is not essential any more than a staff is essential for walk- ing, or a wand for an augur's marking out the houses of heaven ; because it is sometimes taken for granted, that the mere tracing of resemblances, whether clearly as in simile, or confusedly as in metaphor, is poesy above everything else, and a poem is often judged by the novelty and the number of such comparisons. Nor can it be denied, that over and above the finding of lodging or local habitation for the ideas of the mind, the mere tracing of likeness is conducive to the ends of poesy. All I mean to say is, that a poem is not to be judged by its happy comparisons any more than by its happy rhymes ; and that least of all are those poems (dramatic, to vnt) which mainly depend on this first law of poetry to be so judged. To do so would be even more foolish than to appraise a house from a sample of its brick; it would be appraising the house from a sight of the ivy leaves which drape the walls, and give the building a greater depth of shade. Yet often this is done. A man's poems are hashed down, the plums are picked out, and served up as the beauties of Shake- spere or of Byron — beauties that lose half their sweet- IMAGERY. 197 ness by being out of place. At the end of cacli day's labour, the Almighty ]Maker saw that his work was good ; but not till the sixth evening, when he had finished and surveyed all, did he see that it was very good. On the contrary, some of our makers fall into the gross error of writing not a poem, but a book of beauties, stringing their pearls almost at random, in the vain hope that they may give up the unity of the whole for the exceeding beauty of the parts. And the remark of Lord Jeffrey, that there can be no better test of a man's liking for poetry than his liking for John Keats, has often been wrested into an approval of this manner: whereas, it only means that whoever can stand out the extravagance of Keats, must have yielded very far to the third and highest law of poetry — its unconscious- ness. On the other hand, one shows a taste for good poesy, Avho can enjoy the severe beauty of Sophocles, a style the most opposite of any to that of Keats. The Greek poets, whose works were recited rather than read, and above all, the Greek tragedians, whose plays were only recited once, were far less lavish than the modem of those wayside flowers which to us, who can sit down each by himself to read a poem as a whole, or to dwell how we list on the particular passages, are so pleasing. We cannot, therefore, put the comparison very strongly between the ancient and the modern poets, inasmucli as the former, in order to be understood, were compelled by circumstances which have no place with us to mould 198 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. tlieir tlioiights so much more simply ; yet it does hold ill some desi-ee. We are alwavs liable to slide into a kind of poesy which has the same hearing to the better class of romantic poems, that the poesy of Euripides, and afterwards of the Anthology, has to the simpli- city of the classic model. Aristophanes called the fail- ing, as it showed itself in his day, Em'ipid-dandi-like (Ko/jLyjrevpcTriKcof;) ; and these partial beauties, a ribbon here and a trinket so, are very dandilike. We want a more manly poesy ; rich in ornament if you will, so it help out the idea, and do not encumber the poem. These remarks, in themselves tame enough, will be electrified with new meaning, if seen from their proper point of \aew ; if it is seen that they are not general remarks which might cover any page of this volume quite as w^ell as the present, but that they are penned in the interest of the first law of poetry, namely, the imaginative law, which demands that, in expressing our ideas, we give them a place. In turning to consider how imagery is further de- veloped by the second and by the third laws of poetry, I must strike a bargain with the reader as to the mean- ing of certain words. Every one acquainted, however slightly, with the poetical criticism of the last fifty years, must have come across a distinction between what is called Fancy and what is called Imagination ; a distinction first befriended, if not first set on foot, by Words- IMAGERY. l[)[) worthj and afterwards accepted by men far gi-eater than he in the walk of criticism. The distinction is good, and is not good. Almost all Wordsworth's criti- cism is built upon the narrowest basis, and certainly the above distinction is wanting in breadth. Om* re- presentative faculty, commonly called the imagination, sometimes called the mind's eye, he divides into two, one of them called Fancy, the other called Imagination. This in itself is an abuse of language ; the abuse how- ever is felt to be still greater when it is perceived that the division is founded upon no broad distinction in the nature of the faculty, but simply upon a distinction ob- served in the manner in which, at different times and under different circumstances, comparisons are made, as though comparison were the chief work of the faculty. ^' He was tall as a giant," is a comparison said to spring from the Fancy ; '' His stature reached the sky," is a comparison said to come from the Imagination. A difference there is between these comparisons, and well to mark it ; but that difference will not warrant our splitting the imaginative faculty itself into two separate faculties. Entia non sunt 77iulti2)licanda ])rcBter necessi- tatem. The distinction between those comparisons which Wordsworth has referred to the Fancy, and those which he has referred to the Imagination, is entirely owing to the different degrees of consciousness whicli they sev- erally exhibit; and this again is fully explained, if it be remembered that, according: as the imagination is weak or 200 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. strong, its consciousness will be strong or weak. When imagination is at its height, then is consciousness at its lowest ebb ; and as the tide of the latter rises, the spirit of the fomier vanishes. Thus, Wordsworth demands two faculties diiferent in kind to account for that which one and the same faculty, roused to less or greater ac- tivity, quite well explains. The fault of his division is particularly felt when we bring it to bear upon com- parisons that have features neither decidedly of the one cast nor yet of the other ; so that we can hardly tell whether they -are born of Fancy or born of Imagination. No such difficulty can be felt if, instead of setting up two faculties different in kind, to one or other of which these comparisons must belong, we simply ask, as we are alone entitled to ask, whether they are born of a weak or of a strong Imagination ? It is very manifest that the distinction which Words- worth endeavoured to establish between Fancy and Imagination corresponds with the distinction which other critics have endeavoured to establish between Simile and Metaphor. Here, again, the distinction is good, and is not good. In a general way, and so long as we are dealing with extreme instances of simile and of metaphor, it works well ; but when we apply it to doubtful examples, we find, if it is too much to say a distinction without a difference, it is too little to say a distinction founded on a merely mechanical difference, a difference of expression. A simile is distinguished IMAGERY. 201 from a metaplior by tlie accident of having certain words to herald the comparison formally. Rely upon it, unless in our hearts we felt that between the two there lies a diiference less trifling than this of having, or not having, a kind of usher, the distinction woukl long ere now have been forgotten. For it must be re- membered, that many comparisons which have all the rapidity, all the effect, of metaphors, take the lower form of simile only from the unwieldiness of language. We can say, Our mortal life is sunned by faith ; but without coining a word, we cannot say. Our benighted life is mooned by faith ; and here, therefore, if no other expression turns up, we must have recom'se to simile. The simile, however, will be, or ought to be, a virtual metaphor ; and in like manner instances could be given where metaphor is no better than simile, as in Chester- field's couplet, " The dews of the night most carefully shun ; They are tears of the sky for the loss of the sim." And besides, there is a kind of covert comparison, which, if the verbal be the true test, can be ranked neither with simile nor yet with metaphor, into whicli two classes all comparisons are divided,- as the following from Chaucer, " Up rose the sun, and up rose Emelie." Pope clearly saw that the difference between simile and metaphor lies deeper than the turn of expression, when, 202 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. in the preface to his Homer, he said that " a metaphor is a short simile." It is a likeness traced so micon- scioiisly as to be confounded with the reality. Simile is what Wordsworth would have called a fancied resem- blance, metaphor is what he would have called an ima- gined resemblance, had he but noticed that the difference between them must lie in their very nature, and in the feeling which gives them utterance, not in the mode of that utterance, which, of course, must depend upon the accidents of language, the metapliors of one tongue being often the similes of another. If it be said that in doing away with the verbal test no other means are left of distinguishing among comparisons, might ^ve not reply. Better no test whatever, than such a bad one? In any doubtful case, the ordeal of words can no more detect metaphor from simile than the ordeal of drown- ing could detect a witch, the ordeal of fire a thief, or the ordeal of touch a mm'derer. But there is a test, and that test is in every man's bosom ; not an objective standard, but subjective ; a test the same as that em- ployed by Wordsworth to separate between the work of Fancy and the work of Imagination. It is true that this test is variable, not to be enforced in a doubtful case, only convincing each man for himself. What is but simile to me, may to you in a higher state of feel- ing be metaphor ; what is metaphor when read in a poem, may be simile when read detached as a motto. The latter line of Chesterfield's couplet Wordsworth IMAGERY. 203 has described as a mere fancy, and I have described it as a mere simile ; but were it properly placed, were it surrounded on all sides with powerful description it would then become as truly an imagination, as truly a metaphor, as in its own place are the like words of Milton, which, however, if removed from the context, seem to convey a comparison hardly less fanciful than do the words of Chesterfield : " Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal sin Original." Variable though it be, a moment's thought will show that it is the only test in our power. For every one who reads in a tongue with which he is not very fami- liar, has to analyze the words in going along ; as what to the Greek was but a single word Trpoo-ot/co?, express- ing a single thought, neigJibour^ is now, according to the German fashion of using the terminal sigma in the middle of such a compound, virtually broken into two words, irpo^-ocKo^j nigh-hoioer. He has thus also to analyze every metaphor, breaking each into a simile, the comparative conjunction (so, as, like) being sup- plied either in thought or in word. And it must be clear that if a foreigner can and does thus evidently in his own mind decompose metaphors into similes, it is competent for every native to read as similes all those compaiisons which he is unable to appreciate as meta- phors. Simile is the comparison of like with like, not 204 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. forgetting that they are only like ; metaphor is the em- ployment of like for like, not doubting that they are one and the same. By thus bringing the two pairs of distinctions to check one another, I hope that we arrive at something like the truth ; and, as thus understood, I have now to say, that the second law of poetry begets simile, and that the third law of poetry begets metaphor. The fountainhead of simile is the law of Harmony or Affinity. Man has a deep-seated love of unity and wholeness : he cannot bear to look upon a thing in fragments, but will attempt by fair means or by foul to gather and piece the shreds together and survey them as complete. He will not only make the attempt ; but, if he chooses, the attempt may be successful. For, with all great poets it is a ruling idea, many philo- sophers have likewise been assured, and the instinct of every man will tell him, that not only among the out- ward shows, but also among the inward laws of the dif- ferent worlds wherein we live, there is something more than chance similarity, there is a family likeness, a sameness often amounting to repetition. Bacon felt this deeply, declaring that what men of narrow observation conceive as similitudes are really '^ the same footsteps of nature" treading upon different grounds. This, and the ethical principle of disinterestedness (both of them derived from the one law that isolation is nowhere to be found in God's world) were the two points on which IMAGERY. 205 the mind of Butler turned. It were easy to go on mul- tiplying names ; and examples are not far to seek. When Wordsworth sings of poets soion by nature, and of a child groioing in sun and shower^ are these at Lest mere comparisons ? Not so will they appear to one who has attentively read W^ordsworth. Almost every page that he has written bears token of his belief that between man and the flowers of tlie field there is a very close alliance, that man is indeed a tree, endowed with powers of self-knowledge and self-movement ; a faith shared by many beside, but entered into by none so entirely, imless by George Herbert ; a faith which is nowhere more strongly and more frequently affirmed than in the assurances of Holy Writ, and which the legendary lore of Daphnes and Ariels, together with our love for trees, and the way in which we lament their downfal more than anything else not human, proves to be deeply rooted in every bosom. It is the leading object of simile to trace this family likeness wherever it may be found ; and it must be evident that in so doing it is guided by the law of harmony, which, as explained in these pages, might not improperly be called the law of liking. To like, impels us to liken. To dislike, impels us to unliken ; and this not merely in the negative sense of denying wliat would be an agreeable likeness, but also in the positive sense of as- serting one that is disagreeable. Our liking determines the likeness. 206 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. Here, then, let tlie law of Unconsciousness come into play : what must be the effect ? To weld simile into metaphor. The likeness will be more or less blended with that which it reflects, so that in many cases one may not be able at once to tell the substance from the shadow. When the wine of astonishment is so deeply drunk as to bring over us that bewilderment which has been described as peculiar to the third law of poetry, and which is expressed by the Latin (although not by the English) words stupor and torpor ; when, to use strong language, but not too strong even for such a scoffing wit as Shakespere's Biron, a divine voice " Makes heaven droicsy ^^'itli the hannony ; " there may well be this fusion of ideas, confusion if you will. Its highest result is to personify. Localization, Assimilation, Identification ; such, then, are in due order the effects of the three laws of poetry. The first law houses an idea ; the second law matches it with another ; the third law regards them both as one flesh. It remains to be shown that these difterent develop- ments of imagery belong, the first to Dramatic, the second to Epic, and the third to Epical poesy. It is hoped that the reader will in a measure see the truth of this at once, and without any formal proof, as the palpable kind of proof brought forward to show the nature of the versi- IMAGERY. 207 flcation employed in the three different orders of poesy cannot be brought forward here. The form of verse employed in any part of a poem, is the same throngliout. But not so with imagery : we have no guarantee that the kind of image employed in one part of a poem shall be the same in every other. Appeal must therefore be made to general impressions, not to set examples. And first of Dramatic imagery. It has already been observed that when Shakespere speaks of a local habi- tation given by imagination to the phantoms of the brain, he speaks of that kind of imagery which is pecu- liarly his own, dramatic imagery. If instead of such words as we have hitherto employed, locality^ spacej place^ we use the narrower terms, figure^ form^ sha^je (= space defined) 5 and if in connexion with tliese words it be remembered that the drama is the expression of the Beautiful ; it will then be clear how that kind of imagery is peculiarly suitable to this kind of poesy. In so far as imagery is concerned, the latter words might have been employed all along, had it not been an ob- ject by the use of the former and more general terms to make good the remark which, in treating of the Drama, (see p. 130) was taken for granted, that the dramatic, the first law of poetry, begets the idea of place. Scenery is to the whole action of the drama what form or figure is to its passing thoughts. To say of an event that it has taken place^ is an expression arising out of a dra- matic state of feeling. As the scenery is the imagery 208 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. of the entire drama, so its imagery, strictly so called, is the scenery of its individual ideas. This is very happily expressed by Shakespere when he speaks of the airy nothings having a local hahitation ; and the best examples of this kind of imagery are furnished by himself. He has comparisons in abundance, both simile and metaphor : sometimes the image is gTand, sometimes it is grotesque, almost always it is brilliant ; but if as a whole his imagery is remarkable for one thing more than another, it is remarkable for its word- painting, its scene-painting, and if there is one name more than another applied to it by his admirers, they say that it is pictiu'esque. You do not say that Milton or Homer is picturesque ; you do not say that the Psalms of David are pictm^esque. In these, the high- est types of epic and lyric, we do indeed find many a graphic touch ; but gi-aphic power is not their predomi- nant characteristic. It will be found that as the ima- gery of the di*ama is chiefly picturesque, so that of the epic is mainly illustrative, while that of the Ijtiq, is creative or vivifying. If the classical scholar will re- vert to his impressions of the three Greek dramatists, he will see the truth of this. He must know that ^Eschylus, the most lyrical, is remarkable for the num- ber and the boldness of his metaphors. There are few metaphors finer, and perhaps none more often quoted, than that in the Prom^etheus Bound, in which he speaks of the uncontrollable laughter of the waves, IMAGERY. 209 TTOVTCCOV T6 KVfJLaTOJV av7]pL0fjLov jeXaa/xa, a passage, by the way, that is constantly mis-translated, as though referring to what Keble calls "The many-twinkling smile of ocean," when it plainly refers to the open-mouthed laughter of billows that break upon the shore. It is quite different with Sophocles, the purest of the Greek dramatists, who almost resembles Shakespere in the lively pictur- ing of his ideas, and dwells on simile, or on metaphor, not for its own sake, but simply for the purpose of giv- ing shape to the object of his thought. In King (Edi- pus (v. 22, 23, 24,) the priest describes the city as he would a ship, and, after having dismissed the image, he returns to it again, and yet again, still in such an unconscious manner, as to show that in his own mind he is not using it as a comparison, but as a means of realizing to sense that ideal something which the Greeks call TToXt?, and which we call a state. Em'ipides, on the other hand, delights in comparison above all things. Often what seem to be the most rapid metaphors, are, coming from him, only similes. Take the first two lines of the Medea : KdX')(cov 69 alav, Kvavea^ SvfjL7r\7)yaSa<;. 210 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. A ship flying through the water is a metaphor bold cDough^ although common ; but a ship flying through the blue Symplegades is, to any one acquainted with the legend, nothing but a simile. The poet is con- sciously comparing the ship to the pigeon which the Argonauts, by the advice of Phineus, let fly through the rocks, and whose fortune was to foreshadow, and did foreshadow, that of the Argo. Herein, as will pre- sently be explained, he is true to that epic nature which perhaps was the cause of his being so great a favourite with Milton. Before turning to that explanation, however, and in order to allay any remaining doubt as to the charac- ter of dramatic imagery, let Sismondi's criticism of Alfieri, the greatest of late dramatists, be well weighed ; a criticism that has also its meaning as a description of dramatic versification. (Litter, du Midi, Chap, xx.) " Alfieri, above all things, afraid of being compared to Metastasio, sought to render his style hard and short ; to break the harmony wherever there was fear of its becoming sing-song ; to run verse into verse ; to sup- press every superfluous ornament ; all figure^ all com- parisoiij even the most natural^ as another would have studied to impart to his compositions these poetic charms." And then he quotes a passage in which Alfieri exhibits that ideal of a dramatic style which he had endeavoured to fulfil in practice. The fol- lowing words are to the present purpose : "" I may IMAGERY. 211 say that their language is neither too epic, nor at any time lyrical, except when it may be so witliout ceasing to be tragic : thence comes it that tlicrc is in them nothing of comparison except as a very short image, [that is to say, no epic imagery] ; very little of naiTative, which is never long, and never inserted but where necessary ; very few opinions, and none coming from the author ; no swelling of the thoughts, and very- little of the expression," such as we find in the lyric. Of Epic imagery, Sir Eichard Steele gives an excel- lent account. He says, ^' There is nothing so forced and constrained as what we frequently meet with in tragedies, to make a man under the weight of great sorrow, or full of meditation upon what he is soon to execute, cast about for a simile to what he himself is, or the thing which he is going to act." When he says that this is frequently met with in tragedies, he must be understood to mean such as date after the Eestora- tion. Dryden in his later years could not help acknow- ledging this impropriety in his own plays : speaking (Preface to Du Fresnoy) of poets wandering into simile while they are working up a passion, he adds, ^' My Montezuma dies with a fine one in his mouth, but it is out of season." Sir Richard, however, goes on to say, that " there is nothing more proper and natural for a poet, whose business it is to describe, and who is spec- tator of one in that circumstance, when his mind is 212 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. working upon a great image, and that tlie ideas hurry upon his imagination — I say, there is nothing so natural as for a poet to relieve and clear himself from the bm- den of thought at that time, by uttering his conception in simile and metaphor." In the Tatler, from one of the numbers of which (No. 43) the above extract is made, the similes of Tragedy are a standing joke ; and such they might well be, as the dramatists of that day wrought after the classic or epic model, and moulded their images accordingly. It is true that the Tatler makes many playful allusions to the similes of an epic, as well as of a tragic, poet ; but, as in the foregoing quo- tation, the similes are always recognised as not misplaced in a narrative. Steele makes a poet who is anxious to give up business, and to sell his stock in trade, tell over his goods, amongst which there appears the following item : ^' I have further about fifty similes that were never yet applied, besides three-and-twenty descrip- tions of the sun rising, that might be of great use to an epic poet." What then is the use of simile to an epic poet? It will be remembered that the object of the epic (see p. 136) is to express Truth — substantial as well as phe- nomenal truth. Now, simile is the perception from a certain point of view of substantial agreement between things apparently different. Simile is thus, in one way, a continual assertion, a living witness, that in epic •poesy the mind is looking below the surface of things, IMAGERY. 213' looking deeper than the phenomenal, even to the sub- stantial. Whatever its nature, let it be never so far- fetched, it would of itself bear this testimony. But when well chosen, as it commonly is by a great poet simile testifies much more ; it testifies not only that the poet is regarding the substantial, but also that he is relating substantial truth. ^' Use lessens marvel;" a marvel repeated is no marvel. Be the logic good or bad by which we arrive at this conclusion, there it is. When that which we never saw, when that which we never knew, is compared to that which we have seen, or to that which we know; when the uncommon is paralleled by something common, it assumes an air of probability. A single analogy, even when very re- mote and very superficial, is enough to satisfy the mind. Like is likely. Being thus fitted for the purposes of epic poesy, it is natural that simile should be very largely employed by the epic poet. It is the kind of imagery most favoured by Homer ; so greatly favoured indeed, that some critics have not shrunk from declaring that he who, according to Horace, did nothing in vain, qui nil molitur inepte, scattered it far too lavishly. It is to be observed, however, that, in the dialogue, similes are but sparingly introduced ; they are almost entirely confined to the narrative, and there alone can it ever be said of his hand that it was unsparing. Nor does Homer stand alone. With simile Milton abounds, and of his meta- 214 THE LANGUAGE OF POEST. phors, Addison is justified not only in saying that he seldom has recourse to them where the proper and na- tm-al words will do as well, but also in another saying which is applied likewise to Homer and to Virgil, namely, that as the story or fable is the soul of each of their poems, so their episodes are but short fables, their similes are but short episodes, and their metaphors are but short similes. The latter part of this remark will appear more striking than true to one wdio is accustomed to look upon simile merely as an embellishment, and not as a necessary mode of illustration. If the obser- vations already hazarded on the use of simile weigh at all with the reader, they will have prepared him to un- derstand how simile is indeed a kind of episode running parallel to the action of the poem in order to confirm or to illustrate the story ; and if he will not take mine, he may take Addison's word for it, that in the great epic metaphor is for the most part only a kind of simile. The Lyric is that form of poesy best known and best understood. Hitherto it has cost us no trouble, nor will it now present any difficulty As it is the object of dramatic imagery to embody ; as it is the object of epic imagery to compare ; so it is the object of lyrical imagery to animate. This it does by the use of met- aphor, of which the highest t}^e is personification. The metaphorical cast of lyrical imagery none will deny ; it would be labour lost to accumulate the proofs of that IMAGERY. 215 which all must readily admit. Better to show that this cast of imagery follows of necessity from the very nature of a lyric. It has already been stated, that as the great end of the drama is to portray the Beautiful, it naturally adopts a style of imagery that represents place, form, figure, shape, body, or whatever it may be called ; a style that, in the words of Shakespere, bodies forth the forms of things unknown, turns them to shapes, and gives to vague abstractions a local habitation. It has also been shown how, since the aim of an epic is to unfold Truth, very naturally the style of ima- gery adopted is not figurative, is mainly illustrative : the similes may be good illustrations, bad illustrations, or no illustrations at all, but illustrations they are al- ways intended to be. In like manner, it holds that, since the lyric endeavours after the good, it must there- fore naturally employ, not figurative, not illustrative, but creative or lifegiving imagery. If not clear at the first glance, this will be clear with a few words of ex- planation. It was previously mentioned that Hope, Faith, and Love are the feelings with which we regard respectively the Beautiful, the True, and the Good ; it was further mentioned that the Beautiful, the True, and the Good correspond to those words employed by our Saviour when he describes himself as being the Way, the Truth, and the Life. If these expressions are par- allel, what light do they throw upon the Lyric? They 216 THE LANGUAGE OF POESY. show that in the lyric we express our love of the Good, or of what is emphatically called Life, — the Love of Life. But in a loose way, it might be said, according to the Platonic doctrine, that love is life itself, life being mani- fested only as an activity, and love being the principle of activity. So that in the lyric, we might say that Life is in search of Life. Accept this, and it will at once be understood how the lyric, by its imagery, must create, must vivify, must personify, in short, must be metaphorical. BOOK FOURTH. WHAT OF THE POET? 219 WHAT OF THE POET? Whether a perfect theory of the nature of the Poet be possible or impossible^ and whether we shall ever here- after attain to such knowledge or not, it would at least require to be founded on a much wider induction of facts than we at present possess. I therefore beg that the following remarks may be regarded as an inquiry, not as a theory ; an inquiry as of persons at sea, who, without sextant, or compass, or chart, ask each other wistfully where lies the nearest land. " Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant," are the words of one who, being himself King of kings, became the Servant of servants. They are generally taken as an exhortation to lowliness in all who govern ; but they mean much more : they explain the whole art and theory of government. In so far as you gain power over others you always lose power over youi'self : to be the master of any kingdom — earthly or 220 THE POET. uneartlily — you must cease to be jour own master. When this is thoroughly done, it is not enough that time, strength, and everything, heart, head, and hand be given up ; you must often even forget that you have a being, and, unthinking as those stars that guide and rule us, follow the mle and guidance of your sphere. This for two reasons : because only thus can all the powers of your own mind be called forth, and because only thus can your subjects be lulled into that passive frame of mind which will admit of the strongest impres- sions. Men do not readily yield to a power which they see rising before their eyes, and seeking to have the mastery ; not unless the power be seated already, and before they know it. Every dictator, like the dictator of ancient Kome, must win his high place in the dead of night while men are asleep. Such is a most general description of that necessity which all the rulers of mankind, including the poet, obey; and out of it arise two questions. Is it not degrading to admit such a necessity ? some will ask ; and, if the necessity be admitted, all will ask for further informa- tion as to its natiu'e. Let us examine these questions. It may be said that without self-government the so- vereign man of whom we speak must be a mere engine, the poet, a puppet ; and indeed Plato, for the very pur- pose of lowering the poet, endeavom's to show that he is possessed, not self-possessed. This is to renew an THE POET. 221 old feud in which the doctrine of Freedom throws down the gauntlet to the doctrine of Necessity. We cannot let those doughty champions fight it out here, for they might thrust and parry till doomsday ; but perhaps a few words of explanation may settle a truce between them in the meantime. If it is base to be overruled by laws which we never gave, if it is the depth of slavery to be swayed, as we continually are, by laws which we do not even know, it must surely also be great hardship and foul shame that man is not his own maker. But even were he his own maker, even were he a god, we should still in an- other form have to unriddle the problem of an overrul- ing necessity. Without dwelling on that gi'oss fatalism which we so often meet with in the classical theology ; one instance of which is the startling declaration in the first book of Herodotus, that from his destiny it is im- possible even for God to escape ; turn to the Christian view of the subject. God is Almighty we say, and say truly ; but in what sense He is thus mighty, how far He is free, is a subject we are continually stumbling on. Even children will put the question when they are told that God is unable to lie. OvBev aBvuarov irapa TM OeM, el [1^ TO y\revaaa0aL, says Clement of Rome, denying in the latter clause what he affirms in the for- mer. He means that God cannot belie his word ; but he really says that God cannot be false at all, cannot belie his nature. This opens the whole matter : How 222 THE POET. is the Divine nature almighty seeing it is imchangeaHe ? To answer that query is no business of ours : enough to say that if the Divine power is not lowered in our esteem, nor lessened in reality, because it cannot change, so neither is human power weakened, nor should it be contemned, because yielding to necessary laws. These remarks have been made on the side of Neces- sity, and to show that the poet is not worthy of scorn, because not altogether free. Still more, however, has to be said for Freedom. Although we cannot conceive of a will that is absolutely free — neither shackled nor in any way actuated, yet that there is such a thing as freedom no man who feels that he is a reasonable being can for a moment gainsay. And that the poet, as a poet, is also free, none will doubt who have seen how often he follows a bad taste, as in morality men follow a froward liking. Now, wherever there is a right and a wrong, and wherever there is not only freedom of choosing the one or the other, but also a chance, a like- lihood and a danger of sometimes choosing ill, no man in his right reason will blindly trust or blindly obey the bidding of natm-e ; he will not sail before every wind that listeth to blow. Not until he has learnt from ex- perience, perhaps a dearly bought experience, that the wind is a monsoon wafting him safely to his desired haven, will he cease to have misgivings ; and then in- deed does he yield himself fully to the skiey influence, if need be, spreading every stitch of canvass. The poet THE POET. 223 will first be assured that his Pegasus knows the way and then he may give Pegasus the reins. His gun will be well loaded, and his aim carefully taken, but his bullet will fly dead to the mark. He is thus not only possessed, but likewise self-possessed. There is a hap- py ambiguity in om- English way of stating this fact ; we say that a poet is in the possession of his genius, a form of expression that leaves it doubtful which has hold, which is held. He has self-command up to a cer- tain point ; when he loses that command, it is because he has chosen to give it up ; and for so doing he is no more to be blamed than is the shipbuilder who, while his vessel lies on the stocks, can do with it what he pleases, but, in once removing the stays, cannot hinder a launch. A gi'eat poet does not trust to impulse alone ; like Milton, he looks upon hard labour as his lot in life ; he knows that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong ; he will not therefore lie down to sleep like the hare in the fable, but vrill zealously ga- ther materials all he can, both consciously and uncon- sciously, lay trains of thought, and trustfully wait for the hour of his power, when the flash from heaven will descend, the train will be lighted, the mine sprung, the breach made, and the citadel taken. If, then, a necessity can without degradation be al- lowed, and if it be allowed, further information will be asked as to its nature. What is the nature of this which 224 THE POET. is called necessity? What is this called possession? What is this called inspiration ? There are two theories which profess to clear np the mystery; the one very old and using the word inspiration in a literal sense, the other quite modern and using the word in a meta- phorical sense. This latter is so very far from being plain that it is at present the fashionable theory, and especially is be- friended by that crowded class of writers whose words turn up like the tickets of a lottery, most of them blanks, a very few prizes. According to this theory, if I rightly understand it, every man truly great, a hero — that is the word — is of a make quite different from that of other men. They have talent, but he has genius, something different, not only in degree, but also in kind, a patented article, by means of which he can see and say and do things which to them are as impos- sible as flying. When the patentee works by his secret methods he is said to be inspired ; and if he has no control over his inspiration, if his mind rushes on like a steam-engine that the driver is unable to stop, he is then said to be possessed. Although the theory comes to this, it is but fair to add that it is not in gen- eral stated so flatly ; it is commonly enveloped in such a vast cloud of words as might not unworthily be likened to the volumes of mist in which Eastern genii sometimes appeared, only there needs no Solyman, son of Daoud, to enclose the whole of it in a cherry- THE POET. 225 stone. It is wonderful, too, that in thus ovcrwlie-hnliin; us with unmeaning words, the hero-worshippers or fire- worshippers, or whatever they may "be called, give not the slightest heed to Mr Carlyle's outcry against all such preaching, teaching, speeching, screeching 5 for they are professed admirers of his, and — with reverence be it spoken — followers, although at an enormous dis- tance, the distance of an Arab mile, which, being so far as that man cannot be told from woman, is of course farther than that man can be told from man. If such are its forwardest npholders, what of the theory itself? It is a theory founded, and avowedly founded, on igno- rance, the theory by which a black explains the super- iority of a white, the theory of every savage regarding the civilized. Built on ignorance, it is buttressed on every side by self-conceit. For, as envy enters only where there is room for comparison, it pleasantly saves a man's pride to believe that since genius differs in kind from talent, all comparison between them is out of the question ; so that he can look with evil eye no more upon the greatness of a hero than upon the glory of an angel or the endowments of a brute. Thus raised and thus propped, the theory is after all good for nothing ; it neither explains nor attempts to explain ; it rather seeks to drown inquiry, bidding us wait calmly until some genius shall have the good nature to unveil the secret workings of his mind. The candle is put out instead of being snuffed. And then, under the shadow 226 THE POET. of exalting a certain few to a great height, the height of demigods — very doubtful advantage so long as your half breeds are but sony mules; under the shadow of so raising a few, it lowers the many. What it gives to genius it gives at the cost of humanity. The hero is great, not because he is a man, but because he is more than man ; and his crown of honour, therefore, instead of shedding lusti'e, pours shame upon his race. It is meet that a theory, bom of ignorance, fostered by pride, and darkening what it has been sent to enlighten, should thus end by casting reproach upon mankind. Any theory but this. It continually happens that a man ripe in years can find no rest for his soul but in that simple faith of his childhood, which, in the strength of his manhood, and with all the vainglory of his understanding, he had cast away with a sneer. Likewise mankind, after ages of what is at first a gentle misgiving, then a bolder doubt, at last a hardy denial, are fain to retm*n to the sjoot where they first drew breath, there to embrace and to live among those abiding truths whereupon the world's grey fathers relied. In the noon of life a man believes in the power of his understanding, mistrusts his power of intuition ; the more he advances, the more childlike he becomes, reasoning less and trusting more to his instincts. For, in good sooth, his instinct, his intui- tion, his insight, is a guide so much surer and safer than mere understanding, that it may almost be said to be THE POET. 227 the only guide ; as it is not unlikely tliat those truths, which we are supposed to discover by an analytic pro- cesSj are never so discovered, but are seen at a single glance of intuition, at once known and felt to be true, whether we can prove tliem or not, and are then, though not till then, carefully assayed and weighed and stamped by the understanding. Beside that which has just now been criticised tlie only other theory of composition in the field, although at the present day it meets with but little favour, has this merit of having satisfied the earlier instincts of our race, — I mean the theory of a real inspiration. It will have been observed that its phrases are both used and abused by the former theory ; and indeed the two theories might in a manner be coupled, Pelion might be piled upon Ossa, were it not very awkward to attain by the two what ought to be attained by one. The worst faults also of the former might be repeated in this by the same nar- rowness that would make it apply only to a chosen few. By widening the ground, however, so that the theory may apply to all men, these evils at least will be shunned, if others cannot be avoided. It must be confessed that it is a very indefinite theory; and the following remarks will be given, not to any exposition of its details, but simply to an inquiry whether it may not contain some seeds of truth, and thus the means requi- site to a likely solution of the problem. Without dar- ing to offer, and yet without wishing to conceal my own 228 THE POET. opinion, I will, in pushing this inquiry, only relate the opinion of others ; that I may be able, as, in dealing with a matter so sacred and so nearly bordering on the great religious questions of the day, is most becoming, to take up the words of Menander, and say, Mr) TOVTO /SXe-yjrrji; ec veoyrepo^ \eyco, 'AXX! ec (ppovovPTcov rov^ Xoyov<; avZpwv epco. George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, is a name well known; his philosophy deserves to be better known than it is ; and his life should be the best known of all. But the Avorld, forgetting that he lived an apostle and died a saint, has passed judgment only upon his philo- sophy ; and it has fared with him as with many another, that not only are the sins of the father entailed upon the children, but the sins of the children to the latest generation are all heaped upon the head of the father. It has therefore come to pass that his name is a very byword, to many a word of fear, to some a word of scorn ; and there are those who would almost regard it as proving the low estate of the English Church that ever such a man should have been raised to the bench of bishops. j\Iuch, however, as we hear about his phi- losophy, it is little known, it is less understood, and least of all is any acquaintance shown with the end which it had in view. It was put forth against men who main- tained either that there is no God, or that God, having THE POET. 229 made the world, had wound it up like clockwork, and left it for ever. Against whom he set himself to show that this world of sense in which we are all embedded can have no existence apart from a perceiving mind ; that it is upheld only because it is beheld ; and that our perception of it must depend entirely upon the direct and continual action of the Deity upon our minds. This, it will be seen, in at least one department of human thought, amounts to a doctrine of inspiration. And I refer to it, not because Berkeley has proved his main point or points, for he has not, nor yet because they have been disproved, for they never have, but as showing that to one of the most truly philosophic minds that have anywhere shone, to a mind of the largest grasp, to a staid and sober mind, the doctrine of a real inspiration, a never-ceasing Divine suggestion, and this in the lowest walk of human knowledge, not only wore the colour of truth, but likewise carried an air of rea- son ; the rather also, because if the Pantheistic creed be put aside, and if the doctrine of Malebranche as to seeing all things in God be allowed to fraternize with the doctrine of Berkeley, this may be considered as almost the only attempt ever made to prove on philo- sophic gi'ounds that man is inspired of God. But there are two real worlds in which we live and move, there is a world of spirit as well as a world of sense 5 and if it be singular with Berkeley to regard all vision of the latter as inspired, it will be singular to 230 THE POET. regard spiritual vision as uninspired. It seems to be denied by some theologians tbat spiritual knowledge belongs to all men ; tliey seem to say that only the regenerate can have any such, however feeble ; yet as they admit every man to have some idea of a God, and as tliere can be no true idea of a God which is not spiritual, perhaps it will be found that they use the word in a peculiar and technical sense. However this be, there are at least some ; we can point to one great man, George Fox, and to his followers, the Friends, whose faith it is that every man coming into the w^orld is somewhat of a seer, and can at all events see his way to that Fomitain of Light, where his eyeballs may be purged and strengthened, as the eagles are said to pm'ge their sight by gazing on the sun. They believe that this fact is given in psychology, and that the finding of psychology is clinched by warrant of Holy Scriptui'e. But they also believe, and reason as well as Scriptm'e bears them out, that there can be no spiritual light which is not a direct heavenly gift, that none can see God unless God show himself, that the faintest percep- tion of the Divine is divinely inspired. Om- knowledge of sense and our knowledge of spirit are so far alike as they are both immediate. And as George Berkeley believed the fonner to be inspired, as George Fox believed the latter to be inspired, so there have been many to believe that all our other know- ledges, all feelings, all desires, are inbreathed by a holy THE POi:T. 231 or by an unholy spirit. Professor Blackie, in a paper on the Theology of Homer, (Classical Museum, No. xxvi.) gives a very full and clear account of Greek ideas on this subject. The passage deserves to be quoted were it only for its evident sympathy with those ideas : — " It is remarked by some theologian, — T for- get who, — that among all the objections made by the heathen philosophers to the doctrines of the Gospel, no exception was ever taken to the doctrine of divine influ- ence, or the operation of the Holy Ghost on the human mind. This doctrine, Avhicli has been looked upon in modern times by Arminians, Pelagians, and others with a sort of jealousy, could not excite any suspicion, or appear even in the light of a novelty, in an age when all the higher minds in the moral world were in- itiated into the philosophy of Plato or Zeno, and when the great Catholic Bible of popular religious tradition, viz.. Homer, recognised the doctrine of direct spiritual action of the divine mind on the human as one of its most familiar truths. That a man's genius and inclina- tion are all divinely implanted is a truth sufficiently obvious, and which, stated as an abstract proposition, few even now-a-days will deny ,* but the difference be- tween our time and the Homeric in this matter lies not so much in any abstract doctrine as in the comparative frequency of a correspondent phraseology in his lan- guage, and its unfrequency in ours. Thus, for instance, when Ulysses (Od. xix. 227.) says, 232 THE POET. avTap e/jbol ra <^tX' eaKe ra irov ^eo? ev (ppecrl ^r]K€V, aWo<; yap r oXkoiaLv avrjp eiTiTepTrerai epyoc^;, he uses in the first line a distinctly marked Homeric phraseology , while the second line contains only what any of us in our common talk might say any day, and what in fact we do say every day. ' Those things are dear to me which a god jput into my heart'' — this style refers the lik- ings and dislikings of the human heart directly to a di- vine influence ; while the other proposition, ' one man delights in one thing^ another in another^ merely as- serts a human fact without giving any hint of its divine causation. Now, the habitual assertion of this divine causation in all the more notable movements of the human mind is one of the grand prominent features of that atmosphere of religion (or religiosity, as some may prefer to say) which gives such a peculiar colour to the Homeric epos. In the language of an obsolete criticism, (perhaps not yet altogether obsolete in certain quarters) the Olympian personages are termed the '■ machinery' of the poem ; if this word, however, is to be used, it is much more, near the truth to say, that, in Homer's view, the mortal men are everywhere the mere machin- ery of the great drama of existence, of which the gods are the real actors. The constant occurrence in the Homeric page, with reference to human purposes, of such- phrases as hn, ^vfjuS ^dxXetv (Od. i. 200), ewl (f>pea-v ^rJK€ (v. 427), voij/aa irotTjae (xiv. 273), %eov THE POET. 288 vTTodvfjLoa-vvrja-Lv (xvi. 233), and eveirvevae (ppeal Baificov (xix. 138), show how familiar to the okl Hellenic mind was that famous sentiment afterwards expressed by Cicero, ' Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit;^ and not only so, but a sentiment far more extensive than this, \dz., that a man can in fact think nothing worth thinking, except by virtue of a direct divine impulse or inspiration. This is a method of viewing things to which the somewhat mechanical English mind (since the days of Cromwell at least) has shown a gTcat aversion ; but how far it is from being contrary to a high Christian philosophy, the single text, Luke xii. 12, may suffice to show." To the proof. Nay: must everything be proved? Are there not some things which do not admit of proof? and may not this be one ? To the blind man who hears the thunder we cannot prove that it is the noise of light- ning. To the dull man who listens to the poet's song, it cannot be proved that that song noises of God. To the sleeper it cannot be proved that his house is on fire. Every man must awake, must see it and feel it for him- self. What we are now desired to prove was the set- tled faith of great men, of the Irish bishop and of the English Quaker, of the heathen and of the Puritan, of Homer and of Milton. And, whether true or false, this doctrine of inspiration has at least one advantage ; it leaves the question open. The other hypothesis, the theory of genius, unless you are a genius unmistakable, 234 THE POET. shuts the door of inquiry on your face^ although in- quiry is of the utmost importance. It is especially important in the present day. Of far more than specu- lative interest, it very nearly concerns the gi-eat theo- logical questions that are now being mooted, and will be mooted even more hotly hereafter. Almost all of them hinge on one point, the nature of biblical inspira- tion ; of which we cannot be supposed to have much understanding, or any certain knowledge, until we un- derstand and know what is poetical inspiration. The answer to this must furnish a key to that. It is said of Holy Writ, for instance, that not only is the inward thought inspired, but so also is the outward form, eveiy word of it. This may be true or not ; it is quite credible, and every man who longs for some ground of certainty in matters of faith will wish it to be true ; nevertheless, until we explain how it happens that not only do thoughts flash unbidden on the poet's mind, but they even rise up fleshed in an imagery which is none of his choosing, and from which he can no more sunder them than he can part a soul from its body without losing both ; and, most marvellous of all, that he finds them on his lip clothed in words which to himself are wholly new, and which he cannot, dare not, will not, alter, we seem to be utterly unfit to pass any trustworthy judg- ment on this head. There is verbal inspiration : how is it explained ? what is its value ? Eede that riddle, ere we attempt one still more knotty. THE POET. 285 It was the opinion of Goethe, as related in liis Con- versations with Eckermann, that every thought truly great is divinely revealed ; and that even in the form of its expression, however subject to human influences there are traces of Divine handiwork. " No produc- tiveness of the highest kind," he says, '' no remarkable discovery, no gi-eat thought which bears fruit and has results, is in the power of any one : such things are elevated above all earthly control. Man must consider them as an unexpected gift from above, as pure child- ren of God, which he must receive and venerate with joyful thanks. They are akin to the demon which does to him what it pleases, whilst he believes he is acting from his own impulse. In such cases, man may often be considered as an instrument in a higher gov- ernment of the world, as a vessel found worthy for the reception of a Divine influence. I say this whilst I consider how often a single thought has given a differ- ent form to whole centm'ies, and how individual men have, by their expressions, imprinted a stamp upon the age. There is, however, a productiveness of another kind, subjected to earthly influences, and whicli man has more in his power, although here also he flnds cause to bow before something Divine. Under this category I place all that appertains to the execution of a plan, all the links of a chain of thought, tlie ends of which already shine forth ; I also place there all that constitutes the visible body of a work of art." 236 THE POET. The tlieoiy of a real inspiration mil probably meet with most acceptance and least ca^dlJ as thus put by the greatest of German thinkers. The matter, he con- siders, divine ; the form, human, or at least partly hu- man. Yet even thus we are not a whit nearer the solu- tion of the problem. For, entering that region wherein the existence of human influences may to a certain extent be assumed, what do we know ? Be it human or divine, what do we know of the act of creating ? As in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth before he said. Let there be light, and there was light ; so in every case, creation is a work of darkest obscurity. The unconsciousness necessary to productive energy is an effectual bar to any thoroughgoing knowledge of the process ; and to attempt such knowledge is in truth as if one riding at full speed were to stop his horse that he may see how it gallops ; or, as if a sleeper should awake with a view to the examination of di'eaming ; for the unconsciousness almost amounts to a deep sleep Avhen the energy is at its height. Dumbiedykes, in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, is shrewdly advised by his dying father to plant trees, for they grow while we are asleep. Good and great thoughts are in this like trees : they grow to size, put forth leaves and bear fruit without our care, and without watching of any kind. Perhaps nothing great has ever been attained by conscious eifort. ^' Tany thou the Lord's leisure," says the Psalmist ; ^' Atten- tion is the prayer of the intellect," says Malebranche ; THE POET. 237 and such is the attitude of every true worshipper in the temple of knowledge, an attitude of patient waitiiio-. Newton confessed that to his patience he owed every- thing. An apple plucked from the tree was the death and ruin of our race ; an apple falling from the tree told the story of the stars. While the mystery of Genesis thus baffles, it also con- tinually allures inquiry, from that of the child, who daily and hourly digs up the seeds planted in his gar- den that he may see hoAV they are growling, to that of the man, who searches into the rise and growth of ideas. And there would seem to be no reason to doubt, rather good reason to hope, that such inquisition will not be altogether vain. It is to be hoped, that, in asking for an egg, we shall not receive the scorpion of self-con- sciousness into our bosoms, and that we may at least be rewarded with an eggshell, I mean, some superficial knowledge of the forms assumed by the active principle in the course of its development. The coach that passed five minutes ago fixes the word that shall be used five minutes hence ; the soft gliding of a swan and cygnets on the river makes the movement of a verse j perhaps the cawing of a rook, the pat saying of a parrot, the song of a canary, the music of the waits, or sometliing equally foreign, will, unknown to yourself, decide your judgment of what I am now witing ; and what should hinder us from gaining some deeper knowledge than at present we possess of the laws of association, by which 238 THE POET. those influences Avork ? What was there m the nature of things to prevent John Dennis, the gi'eat, from writ- ing that work which Steele described as in progress, showing ^' from reason and philosophy why oysters are cried, cardmatches sung, turnips and all other vegetables neither cried, sung, nor said, but sold with an accent and tone natural neither to man nor to beast"? Per- haps criticism may yet accomplish the feat, fathoming all the depths of " Old Clo'," and reaching all the heights of '^ Caller oo." Here, however, nothing so high nor so low will be attempted. In the following remarks it is proposed simply to glance at the history of art in so far as its development in the individual and in the national soul are alike. I. It is veiy true that the chief end of poesy is plea- sure : but we must beware of understanding this too loosely. A thing of pleasure we are not wont to regard as of need ; we may have it or not according as we choose ; in common parlance we may have it at plea- sure, that is, at will. Is poesy, then, the oftspring of human will, or of an unavoidable instinct ? Up to a certain point, it will be readily admitted that the expression of our feelings generally, therefore of poetic feeling, is unavoidable. Says Malcolm in Mac- beth, " Give sorrow words : the grief that does not speak Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." THE POET. 239 So x^lvarez in Aaron Hill's tragedy of Alzira : " Words will have way, or grief, supprcst in vain, Will burst its passage A\dth the outbursting soul ; " and many more ; all of whom but echo the words so well known to every one, " Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." These statements may be taken as acknowledging the fact, as beautiful illustra- tions of it also, but are by no means to be regarded as explanatory. For it is remarkable, that even when the cause of our feeling — say giief — is in nothing weakened, but remains in full force, and perhaps may have been strengthened, the merely having given utterance to our sorrow yesterday, lightens it to-day and for ever. We can easily understand how, by simply putting our feel- ings into words for the benefit of another, or into a journal for no other eye than our own, they should for the time cool down, writing and speaking being in their nature so much more cold-blooded than is feeling ; but why they should, as they often do, remain cool for ever after, is not so clear. And we find the same law in the head as well as in the heart ; for bm-n as we may to communicate our knowledge, when once we have done so — whether we have really made it known to some one, or only ^Titten it on paper, placing that paper in a desk, we have often no more desire to tell it, and cease even to think of it ; or, if we do so, it comes up in some new shape, or linked with some new fact. 240 THE POET. Bearing this in mind, that to write in a diary, or, as Bacon tells, the speaking to a statue, gives often as much relief as speaking to a friend ; it will be evident that to account fully for the necessity felt more or less by all thus to express what is passing within them, we must look to something deeper than the social impulse, we must go down to the instincts of the individual man. Xow, it is clear, that what first of all we want is to make a memorial. The prisoner who writes on the dim wall of his dungeon, the lone traveller who builds a cairn, the copper Indian notching his club, is satisfied with this, and with nothing short of tliis. And what is it but the working of the instinct of self-preservation ? the instinct of immortality, an instinct which is no doubt most often found in league with the social feel- ings, but which, as surely as we have been so framed that in the life to come we shall be like the angels of God, neither marrying nor giving in marriage, is in reality concerned only with our individual selves. In this instinct, eveiy word that we utter, all remem- brancers whatsoever, much more those of the poet, are rooted. He, far more than other men, is influenced by ^' the pleasing hope, the fond desire, the longing after immortality." This it is which throws a lustre on the meanest work of art. It dignifies the very rattling of a chatterbox. This hope, however, this desire is not to be confound- ed with a thirst of fame. It may take that shape ; as THE POET. 241 was most remarkably seen in the Elizabethan poets • but such a feeling is no essential part of it. " Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled, On fame's eternal bederoll worthy to be filed:" Here is but one out of a hundred such expressions that might be culled from the poets of Elizabeth. A poor man is Chaucer if eternal fame is all that he has earned ; and how very poor are those who, having sought the bubble reputation, have never found it! This hope might have comforted the heart of a heathen : it was natural that the Spartan kings in going to battle should sacrifice to the muses, with a prayer that, if they died in the fight, they miglit at least live in song ; but it will not much move a believer in that Gospel which has brought Life and Immortality to light. And if ever expressed in the writings of Christian poets, it is surely in its right place when there found in the pages of those whose Allfather is the superannuated Jupiter, whose Mediator is a Cupid, and whose inspiration is begged of those ladies who haunt the garrets of Parnas- sus. It will be found, indeed, in the history of Eng- lish poesy, that, according as poets rejected the heathen gods, they learned to make light of fame. In the Verses by a Lady of Quality, Pope ridiculed the mo- dem worship of Olympus, and in all that he has written he has likewise professed to hold fame cheap. Later still, when our poesy had been thoroughly cleansed of Q 242 THE POET. the heathen hypocrisy, we find Goldsmith, in the pre- face to his Essays, making merry with the idea of fame by drawing a bill upon posterity, thus : ^' Mr Posterity, '' Sir, ^' Nine hundred and ninety-nine years after sight hereof, pay the bearer or order a thou- sand pounds worth of praise, free from all deductions whatsoever, it being a commodity that will then be very serviceable to him, and place it to the account of, &c." And now perhaps it is not too much to say that our best writers, without overlooking or undervaluing the advantage and the pleasure of fair renown, would not only refuse to consider fame as anything more than the means to an end, and think it beneath them to place their highest happiness on such a stake, but even re- gard with a kind of loathing the expressions of those who do. It would be wrong to make an exception even of the guess hazarded by Sir James Mackintosh that a man after all might be content to find his im- mortality in the memories of his fellow-men ; a fleet- ing fancy which he would never openly and heartily have avowed. The only imperishable fame, the only fame for a Christian, the only fame to satisfy the man who will for a moment rise above himself, would be the everlasting remembrance of Him who inhabiteth eternity ; for the sake of which he would dare, and might well dare, enter the darkest gate of death, and THE POET. 243 be no more, utterly forgetting as otherwise utterly for- gotten. The instinct of immortality, then, which belongs to every man, but above all to the artist, is not to be mis- taken for a lust of renown. The poet seeks to pre- serve himself, not to preserve his name, which indeed is no part of himself. His name and the glory of his name exist not in his own mind, but have their being altogether in the thoughts of others. It is himself and all that really belongs to him, all that is his by birth- right, or that he has made his own by conquest of love, his country and his times, whatever he has seen or heard or thought or felt ; not things, but his own ideas of things, that he desires and attempts to keep in memory, as on that faculty depends the assurance of his own identity. Daily a man comes in contact with Death, and with Oblivion, the deputy of Death. After he has thought, his thoughts vanish ; after he has spoken, his words evaporate ; after he has acted, his actions hide their faces ; and the artist desires not simply an Amrit, or drink of Immortality, by which to preserve the essential Me ; he desires by works of art to insm-e the continued existence of those passing thoughts and words and actions. He therefore more or less con- sciously feels that it is his to sing, to build, to mould, to paint, for eternity. Such may not be the event ; his works may be altogether lost, or, as in the case of Ossian, they may be at best like that echo in Nor- 244 THE POET. maiidj, the Echo of Genetay, where a person speaking will hear only his own words, while those at any distance can catch only their echoes ; but this does not enter into his reckoning. He composes because he can- not help composing ; he is driven to perpetuate his thoughts by an unavoidable instinct, that he may say, as Horace said wdien he ushered into the world the first collection of his odes, — " Non omnis moriar ! multaque pars mei Vitabit Libitinam." If these views be correct it must be e\ddent that the primary source of art is a private, not, as is commonly supposed, a social impulse, such as a desire to please or to do good. It is an impulse that would m.ove to com- position as well in a lonely Juan Fernandez as in the theatres of Athens or in the galleries of London ; and he who will not yield to its influence must pine and die, concealment, like a worm i' the bud, gnawing at the heart. The reader must often have marked how au- thors, of whom Pope is one, declare in a preface that they began to compose for their own pleasure, and that they publish hoping to please their neighbours. In the life of Congreve, referring to The Old Bachelor of that writer, Samuel Johnson speaks of this avowal as a strange affectation, and perhaps this is the light in which it is commonly viewed. Almost every preface, at least when prefixed to a vrork of imagination, may THE POET. 245 be regarded as a wonderful affectation, reminding one of the mediaeval legend about the young lions, who, it would seem, are born dead and so remain till on the third day their father comes and startles them into life by his roaring ; for by some such prefatory roar it is the habit of an author to set his dead bantlings upon their legs. But the above form of preface is not peculiarly strange nor peculiarly affected ; it is rather a truism which ought never to be repeated, which ought mercifully to be taken for granted. Necessity is laid upon the artist to compose in the first instance for himself : to compose for the eye or ear of another is an afterthought. While these feelings more or less influence the artist of every epoch, and at every period of his life, it is to be observed that they chiefly prevail in the earliest, that is to say, in the Lyrical era. Lyrics are the first- fruits of art, the early figs ; and, as already has been shown (p. 119), the idea of a Lyric is Immortality. Such also is the governing idea of that Oriental art and life, in the midst of which the Lyric has ever sprung up in the greatest perfection. Of this perhaps no proof could be afforded more striking than the fact that, in propor- tion to the whole of the known remains of Eastern art, a vast number connect themselves with the tomb. Almost all that we know of Egyptian art is derived from the monuments of the dead ; and although pro- bably we are indebted in like degree to the sepulchres of no other people, unless to those of the Etruscans, a 246 THE POET. race of Lydian descent and of the true Eastern type, still in this, as in so many other points, the Egyptian fact is bnt the extreme instance of a peculiarity com- mon to most Oriental nations. Deep and full of in- terest as is the mystery of life and death to every child of Adam, none have gazed upon it so wonder- ingly, none have brooded over it so earnestly, as those who dwell in the great nursery of the human race. There was mother Eve tempted to eat of the tree of life ; there the Chaldean shepherds, in attempting by astrology to learn from the stars the secrets of life, laid the foundations of a new science ; there the Arabic sages founded another great science in endeavouring by alchymy to discover the elixir of life. And under the eye of heaven there is not a more touching sight than is presented by the Oriental artists when they so often enter the tombs to protest against dissolution. The Etruscans arranged the houses of the dead as if they were houses of the living, with panelled walls and fretted ceilings, elbow-chairs, footstools, benches, wine- flagons, drinking-cups, ointment-phials, basins, mir- rors, and other furniture ; and the Orientals generally, by painting, by sculpture, by writing, have this habit of, as it were, chalking in large letters upon their se- pulchres, No Death. But the moralists of a certain school will exclaim with horror that, at this stage of its development, art must be very selfish. And so it is in the sense in THE POET. 247 which it may also be said that the Lyric is egotistic and that the Orientals are remarkable for their ego- tism ; but not in a bad sense. When the egotism of the Lyric and of Oriental life generally takes a repre- hensible form, it appears not simply nor chiefly as opposed to that disinterestedness which is the charm of social intercourse, although in many cases it does thus show itself; it appears rather in making a God of self. The egoism of philosophy comes at last to this, Ego=GoD; and such, the merely speculative re- sult, the reductio ad absurdum of subjective idealism, is often the practical result of Eastern egotism. This may be seen in their theocracies. There has been a great deal of disputing in our day as to the natm-e of the relationship that ought to subsist between Church and State. Only under Christianity, only under a religion that, asserting the freedom of the will, insists upon individual responsibility, could it for a moment be sup- posed that the one might be wholly independent of the other. In ancient Greece the Church and State were one, and the question whether the former might ever wield the power of the sword, or the latter the power of the keys, would to a Greek seem as trifling as to us would be the question whether a man miglit ever use a knife with his left hand or a fork with his right. Unlike the Christian as unlike the Greek, the Orien- tal not seldom lived under a theocracy in the strictest sense of the term : that is to say, the State was not 248 THE POET. simply the Church, it was the Deity; the King was more than a high priest, he was very God, or the vicar of God. Nor is this the only way in which the Orien- tals have signalized themselves by the assumption of Divinity : all sacred writings are of the East. Whe- ther truly or not, and whether it be in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Shasters, in the Vedas, or in other books, the wise men of the East have put forward the most re- markable claims ; they profess to utter divine oracles, and this, not simply by revealing the will, but even in some cases by repeating the words of the Most High. Nay, there was one sect of ]\Iohammedans, the Sonnites or orthodox, who, in opposition to the Motazalites and Schiites, maintained to the death that the Koran is uncreated and eternal. Finally, is there not a world of meaning in that story of Psapho who, in the Libyan desert, taught the birds to say and thus to spread a re- port that Psapho is a God ? II. This leads us to the second, a liigher stage of artistic progress. For the deifying of self above men- tioned is but the prematm-e development of a great truth ; the lyrical anticipation of an epic idea. That Immortality, through which alone Good is possible, is the dream of the lyric. But in striving after this it very soon and naturally becomes a question. How is Immortality itself possible ? and it is readily perceived that to God alone belongs in any strict sense and as an THE POET. 249 essential attribute Everlasting life. This truth is per- ceived by the lyrical as well as by the epic artist ; but the former in the mingled blindness of haste and egotism leaps to a wrong conclusion. He willeth his own im- mortality ; then, discerning how alone it is possible, he willeth his own Divinity. Such was the tragedy of Eden. Yearning after immortality, our first parents would be as Gods possessed of the secret of immortal- ity. Or, if not to this, the Oriental goes to the other extreme, and looks forward to the abolition of his own individuality, when at death his life shall return to God who gave it, and he shall be swallowed up and for ever lost in the Divine. Not so does it fare with the Greek or epic artist. He too has a craving for immortality, and to him also comes in due time the query. Is it possible ? and how is it possible ? With him, however, the result is, that he is content to deny self, content to be naught, con- tent to die that he may thus truly live. Even when, in his most lyrical mood, the Greek displays so much of self-seeking as to pant for deathless renown, he is clearly willing so far to deny himself as to merge his own immortality in that of his race. For, rightly understood, does not the desire of fame amount to this : Though I, an individual, go hence, yet my race will survive — survive perhaps for ever; and, content to die, since death is inevitable, I hope in the re- membrance of that race to live everlastingly. But, in 250 THE POET. epic mood, the artist goes much farther, insomuch that his feeling may be regarded as the veiy antipodes of lyrical. Burning for immoi-tality, he soon discovers that it is not an inherent property of the Ego; but he finds it in the Non-ego, he finds it only in God. What then ? Can you understand how he should acquiesce in such a state of things ? Understand it or not, he does acquiesce, and this acquiescence ever is the turning point of a man's life, by which he passes from what 3Ir Carlyle would call the everlast- ing Xo to the everlasting Yes. Of self, says the artist, I will think no more, talk no more, — let me think and speak of eternal realities, whatever these may be ; I may or may not achieve immortality, but whether life or death be mine, I will live and die in the pre- sence of the Eternal. In a word, he prizes immor- tality as much as ever, but now no longer for himself nor for its own sake ; he prizes it as characteristic of the alone true, the alone real, the alone Divine. Keality : after stating this to be tlie grand object of Greek or epic art, is it any conti'adiction to say that the Greek or epic artist above everything sought after the Divine ideal? It is but another version of the same statement ; the Divine ideal being the only steadfast reality. And perhaps it is in this form that the truth will most readily be recognised, for it is the version most commonly received ; in fact, so commonly received that, opening any treatise on the nature of art, whether THE POET. 251 a college essay or an academy lecture, an article or a volume, we find it blazoned on every page that the Greek strove heart and hand to embody the ideal, to incarnate the Divine. For the ablest, the fullest, the most eloquent, and in every way the best exposition of this, the theology of art, the reader is referred to Mr Euskin's work on Modem Painters. It is true that he there says little or nothing directly bearing on the productions of Greek art, but the whole of his work is T\T:itten from a Greek, that is, an epic or historical point of view. All art is of necessity more or less historical. Even when most exclusively lyrical in form as well as in spirit, even in music, even in the dance, it has to a certain extent the effect of history ; and indeed every overt act of which man is capable partakes of the same nature, so as willingly or unwillingly to tell a tale. It must be evident, however, that there is a class of works which are historical in a much narrower sense, historical not simply in effect, but also in design. In the lyric the poet merely puts his own existence to the proof, merely desires to perpetuate that existence by its repro- duction under new forms, in a word, merely displays what the Orientals have always remarkably displayed, and what a phrenologist would call philoprogenitive- ness. The spirit of the true historian, however, is not thus philoprogenitive, it is rather acquisitive. He de- sires to take possession of the Non-ego, and to make 252 THE POET. it a possession for ever — Krrj/Jia e? aec. In search of the essentially true and real, he very soon finds that it is not in the Me, that it is uncreate, that it is Divine ; and he endeavours by historical belief and historical records to make the Divine a human possession. The Muses were daughters of Zeus and of Mnemosyne ; their ideas were of heaven, their arts were but arts of ]\Iemory. III. Here enters Christianity, not simply giving to mankind an historical revelation of certain Divine facts, but also, as its chief glory, imparting to the soul of the believer a Divine life ; and that makes all the difference between Olympian and Christian, epic and dramatic art. The epic artist gazes upon the Divine from afar ; and whether he gives utterance in lyrical, in narrative, or in imitative forms to what he has thus apprehended, he does it with an eye to history : this or that is worth knowing, worth remembering, worth hav- ing, let it therefore be recorded with indelible inks and with pens of iron. The dramatic artist, however, draws nearer to God, is transformed into the Divine likeness, and begins to imitate for the sake of imitating. The epic artist beholding something divine, say, in a flower, if he be a painter, endeavom'S with his pencil to imi- tate its shape and hues; but this, only that he may appropriate the divine something as by a bond or deed of security. On the other hand, the dramatist, when he sees the godly existence of a plant, puts himself THE po?:t. 253 into the position of a plant, becomes in some sense a flower, thus appropriates by a profound fellow-feeling its divine life, and with pencil and palette projects upon the canvass what is now a reflection as much of himself as of the flower. In so doing, he is vir- tually an historiographer ; but he is not such an histo- rian as Mr Euskin describes in his pamphlet on the Pre-Raphaelites. His object is not history, although in a manner more or less historical he gives expression to his sympathy. That one word. Sympathy, implies the whole of dramatic art ; to unfold which in all its details would require the masterly hand of Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments, although by no means a complete solution of purely ethical problems, might neverthe- less furnish a model for the satisfactory treatment of dramatic ideas in their most general bearings ; as a treatise on the drama in its loftiest bearing, might be entitled, like that of Thomas a Kempis, De Imitatione Christi. Here there is room but for a very few re- marks. The decisive act which renders a man truly Christian, is essentially a dramatic act. It may appear in various forms, and it may be described in various ways, some of them strong, some of them weak; yet, however appear- ing, and however described, we may in every case detect the dramatic element. For example, what Saint Paul calls Faith as distinguished from what Saint James calls 254 THE POET. Faith, the Saving Faith distinguished by theologians from Historical ; at bottom what is it, but a dramatic feel- ing as distinguished from an epical ? The following ac- count of it, as the faith of Saint Paul, is given by F. W. Krummacher, and certainly in very daring terms : " The eagle eye of his faith had learned to gaze upon Christ in those higher, spiritual, and mysterious relations in which he stands as the Head, Intercessor, and second Adam of his people. Thou sayest to Jesus, How glori- ous art thou ! Paulj How glorious am I in thee ! Thou^ Christ was obedient : Paidj I obeyed in Christ. ThoUj Christ suffered, died, rose again and ascended into heaven : Paul^ I suffered in Gethsemane, I died on the cross, the Father justified me on the third day, and placed me in Christ in heavenly places. ThoUj Christ has sat down triumphant on high : Paul^ I sit down above in my Head, and triumph. On looking at Christ, thou only feelest thy distance from the Holy One : Paulj on the contrary, rejoices in his union with the same. Thou thinkest of his people only as forming a third party : Paul looks upon himself and his brethren as grow- ing into one man with Christ. TJiou makest a distinc- tion between him and thyself : Paul^ on the sunny height of his evangelical illumination, beholds this distinction dissolved, and extols himself when he extols Christ. Thou art still fearful in the presence of the majestic and righteous God : Paul thinks. Shall I be afraid at the sight of my o"^ti purity ? for as he is so are we also in THE POET. 255 this world." Sucli is the strong language of an ex- treme Calvinist ; and it is here quoted simply as a very forcible statement of what preachers have often great difficulty in explaining, the manner in which what they call historical faith differs from what they call sav- ing faith, showing that the former is truly an epic, the latter truly a dramatic, reception of the Gospel. Even those who would shrink from a statement so bold, even those who disown the doctrine of imputed righteous- ness, even those who, going still further, reject alto- gether the idea of an atonement, cannot, and do not explain away, so as to rid of their dramatic meaning, those texts of Scripture which speak of dying with Christ, being buried with Christ, rising with Christ, living with Christ, having a life hid with Christ in God, reigning with Christ, putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. There is, in fact, no class of Christians who do not regard the essence of the Christian life as being in some sort the dramatic appropriation by each believer of what properly belongs to the Saviour alone. There have been doubts as to who the Saviour is, and as to what he has done, but whoever he may be, and what- ever he may have done, it is on all hands admitted that the essential of Christianity is this adoption of his life and of his acts. Differences of historical faith will, of course, affect the value of such dramatic adoption ; if one man believes that Jesus was Divine, while another believes it not, they will dramatically identify them- 256 THE POET. selves with two widely different beings, and the effects will be different accordingly : that, however, is nothing to the case before us. The point to be observed is, that the religious life of a Christian is essentially dramatic, and that herein it is distinguished from every other. Is it wonder- ful that dramatic art should spring up with unexampled vigom* under the influence of a religion which thus sys- tematically teaches and trains its votaries to dramatise ? It will thus be clearly seen that the passage from epic to dramatic art is akin to the development of historical into what theologians have not very happily called saving faith. That this development should be pos- sible, that man, gazing upon the Divine, should be more than a witness and historian, that he should be capable of sympathy and imitation, implies that he has in him something in common with the Godhead. He has Freedom ; and, in the exercise of this freedom, we see the radical difference between the epic and the dramatic artist. Historical faith is not in our own power ; we can at will neither credit nor discredit : there are the evidences ; if they are trustworthy we cannot choose but believe, if they are not, we cannot help doubting. Dramatic faith, however, is very much, if not entirely, a matter of choice ; we may, or may not, according to our pleasure, put ourselves into this or that situation, and adopt such or such sentiments. Hence, the his- torian is bound and is willing to take things exactly as he finds them, rejecting naught, and selecting naught ; THE POET. 257 while the dramatist^ on the contrary, asserting his own freedom^ is determined to pick and choose. The artist, thus free, is in very truth a creator, since, where freedom is, there evidently is power to originate. And, in passing, let it be observed, that this viewing of the artist as a creator is peculiar to the criticism of mo- dern or dramatic art : in Greek criticism, such a view is, if not wholly overlooked, at any rate caught with few and hm'ried glances. The theory of Plato, that eveiy human maker, whether artist or artisan, is but a copier of certain archetypal ideas which are either un- created or created by God, and which, at all events, are independent of the human worker, however Platonic in the manner of its enunciation, expresses not simply the opinion of an individual ; it expresses the sentiment that pervades Greek art and criticism. He who made the first harp, the first watch, or the first telescope, was, strictly speaking, no inventor, no creator ; he but copied a pre-existent idea, the remembrance of a pre-existent state : such is Plato's manner of saying, what in one shape or another every Greek would have allowed, that art is but historical or mirror-like. To us, on the con- trary, art is much more than a miiTor ; it is creative. True it is, that modem art, being dramatic, is in its nature imitative ; but that is no contradiction. To imitate the Divine, and that in the spirit not of epic, but of dramatic art, is to create. For, in the sympathy and appropriation of a dramatist, as already has been 258 THE POET. said, freedom is implied ; and what is freedomj if not in some sort the power to originate ? And now will be understood the wide range of dra- matic art. It is in the exercise of Freedom that the human mind has a relationship and fellow-feeling with the Divine ; and, conversely, wherever we see Freedom, there we trace Divinity, since Freedom belongs only to God, or to those with whom God has shared the Divine franchise. And of this Divine franchise are we not all more or less partakers ? We are, and it is because we are, that the di-ama is so intensely human. In Greek, or epic art, men are but the chessmen of the gods ; the gods are all in all. Dramatic art, on the other hand, giving to man the authorship of his own actions, and thus recognising that he too is Divine, that he too is an electric, not a mere conductor, delights to exhibit the Divine gift of freedom exercised in that field which is best known, the field of human endeavour. And even a wider circuit is embraced by dramatic art. For, wherever Beauty is, there also is Freedom, as the breath of its life ; while ugliness, like sin, is a willing bondage. The dramatist, therefore, rejoices to declare his sympathy not only with God, not only with man, but also with all nature, everything capable of beauty, everything that seems capable of that freedom which is " the glorious liberty of the sons of God." THE POET. "259 Such is a very rapid outline of the development of art as it appears in the history of the individual Shakespere, for example, or Byron ; as it appears in the history of nations, Greece, Italy, England • and as it has appeared in the history of the mighty race to which we belong, which is sometimes called the White, sometimes the Caucasian, and which, em- bracing the Arab, the Pelasgic, the Teutonic, and other branches, and spreading over the whole of Europe, the Northern shores of Africa, and the Western half of Asia (not to mention late migrations) has ever claimed and made good its right to stand at the head of the family of man. It will not be supposed, however, that, in asserting the Oriental or Arabian branches of this race to be of a peculiarly lyrical turn, the Greek or Pelasgic to be more deeply imbued with epic ideas, and the Western or Teutonic to be remarkable for their dramatism, it is for a moment denied that other ideas and forms of art but those in which they severally ex- cel are cultivated, and even carried to great perfection, in the diiferent tribes. It is as impossible to ignore the Hindoo dramas, and the Arabic and Persian tales, as to overlook the lyrists and dramatists of Greece, or the songs and romances of Western Europe ,• and all that is meant is, that, according to the epoch of civilisation, or the stage of development to which they belong, the individual, the people, and the race, will dwell chiefly on ideas of Future, of Past, or of Present ; of Immor- 260 THE POET. tality, of God, or of Freedom ; of Good, of True, or of Beaiitifal ; of the Lyric, of the Epic, or of the Drama. In old legend there are strange stories told of a basil- isk which kills you if it sees you before itself is seen, but which you kill if you can see it before being seen. In this respect, objections are a kind of basilisk ; if an- ticipated they are harmless, if not, they often do a great deal of mischief. I would therefore beg that, since the foregoing sketch has been of necessity so very cursory, the reader will grant me some indulgence if any diffi- culties should arise, if the meaning has not in every case been made intelligible, or if any of the opinions hazarded seem not to be sufficiently well established. Some of these difficulties -^^-ill vanish, the doubtful posi- tions will be illustrated, perhaps confirmed, and the whole drift of the sketch will be better understood, if read in the light of the views put forward in the first part of the Third Book, and at page 119 concentrated in a tabular form. BOOK FIFTH, THE WORTH OF POESY. 263 CHAPTER I. ON THE DEFENCE OF POESY. The defence of poesy has already more than once been written ; and with more than usual power by a Sidney and a Shelley. Without any slight to these able works^ it may, however, be said, that they can have little weight with those who push poetry to defend its own. They are mostly written from the whereabouts of the poet ; and the weapon employed is the unsearchable logic of poesy — a logic most true, but too brief for com- mon purposes, a logic swift and untraceable as elec- tricity, flying straight from point to point, unmindful of the turns, the stoppages, and the stages, the ifs, buts, and therefores, of ordinary argument. Such reasoning will seldom hit those who drive poets to the defensive. The poet is thus pressed by two very different per- sonages ; by the philosopher, and by one who stands between philosopher and poet, of neither gender, the proser. The proser has been dipt in some unknown Styx that has case-hardened him against almost every weapon 264 THE DEFENCE' OF POESY. — all but the heel ; and there is no way of dealing with him but by putting motion into those heels, I mean, by arousing his activities ; and then he will turn, accord- ing to his degree, either a poet or a philosopher. If he takes the part of the poet, good and well, nothing more has to be said. If he becomes a philosopher, and still decries the poet, he must be met on the side of his arithmetical understanding with common logic and the rule of three. In the foregoing pages, it is hoped that somewhat has been advanced, which, in this regard, may be of service ; since if anything need and be worthy of de- fence, the best that can be given is to make known its real nature, and show its true colours. Having already at some length (in Books Third and Fourth) put for- ward doctrines that illustrate the positive worth of poesy, it will here be sufficient to stand wholly on the defen- sive. Not that in every case, and from every mind, it will be possible to remove objections ; but at least they may be silenced. We may spike the guns which we cannot take away. There is no denying that, however much poesy may be ill-spoken of by some, it has always been well re- ceived by the wide world ; more heartily welcomed than aught else the work of man ; more lastingly kept, and never willingly forgotten. This is not (although it might be) brought forward as a plea in favour of poetry, lest any one should think that plea in danger of THE DEFENCE OF POESY. 265 Bacon's remark, that man has in him more of the fool than of the wise, and is more strongly influenced by his foolish than by his reasonable powers ; but simply to show, that on the whole poets have no gi-ound for quarrelling with their treatment and their lot on this earth. Pindar, for his poesy, is said to have been loved of Pan, and even to have heard one of his own odes chanted by the god : there is a truth in the story. Any direct and formal charge is seldom brought against poetry : it is generally assailed by means of clever backstrokes and passing lounges. Oftenest of all, however, with inarticulate sneers. And these at- tacks come not merely from such as Sir Edward Coke, who, in the exercise of his judicial functions, foredoomed to everlasting pain five classes of men, namely. Chemists, Monopolists, Concealers, Promoters, and Khyming Poets ; but even from such writers as Bacon. The latter have keenly felt the power of poetry, but have been unwilling to own because unable satis- factorily to account for that power, and have fretted and chafed under the yoke. They have often been gifted with no small share of the poetic faculty, and in anticipation of Hahnemann have sought by a small dose of poetic language to cure the poetry of their fel- lows. Like the monkeys, that, to keep the sailors from landing on their island, pelted them with cocoa-nuts, the very and only thing which was wanted, Bacon pelted the poet with flowers, and tried to stop his mouth 266 THE DEFENCE OF POESY. with pleasant words : while others, beside, in rich and glowing language, seek to overwhelm the imagination and its works. They are bent on the same error as the wise men of Gotham, who set about the drowning of an eel. Upon all such, the scorners of poesy, Sir Philip Sidney, in closing the treatise above mentioned, has pronounced a curse which would certainly be very frightful if it would only take eifect : " Thus much curse I must lend you in the behalf of all poets, that while you live you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet ; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph." Whenever these assailants come to close quarters, and give us a clue to their meaning, it will be found that their objections naturally range themselves under three heads. They say that poesy is not Beautiful, or not True, or not Good. An attempt has already been made in these pages to show that it is all three. It is now behoveful to show the insufficiency of those grounds upon which the doctrine is denied. 267 CHAPTER 11. BEAUTY OF POESY. It is objected that Poesy is not beautiful. The objec- tion, indeed, is never stated thus plainly, but rather implied, and implied in such a way, that it might al- most be regarded as impugning either the truth or the good of poesy even more than its beauty. Thus para- sitically entwined with other and bolder objections, it is not possible to grapple with it singly ; and we must therefore consider it as entangled, in the first place with a question of Truth, in the second place with a question of Good. Of the many forms which objections of the for- mer class may take, the Puritanic seems not yet to have spent itself. " The imaginations of men's hearts are only evil continually," it is said ; and therefore from the delights of the imagination we are to call a solemn, a perpetual fast. Such a fast is simply impos- sible ; at best it can only be a Ramazan, which forbids food during the day, but allows it after sunset, since. 268 BEAUTY OF POESY. if dreams may be banished in our waking hours, they will jet return in the night. Here, the objector, de- sirous of wielding the lash of William Prjnne, or the cudgel of Jeremy Collier, will perhaps point signi- ficantly to the license of certain poems, or certain plays, and ask if, with such before his eyes, any right-minded man can allow himself to indulge in the reading of poesy. The foulness of many a poem and many a play is undeniable. Great part of the famous Alexandrian library, which was turned into fuel for the public baths, was unworthy even thus remotely of being applied to a cleanly pm'pose ; and if a Jew had bathed in waters thus warmed, he might with reason have deemed him- self unclean as a leper for the remainder of his days. But the fact of certain poems and certain plays being bad, is no more an argument against poesy, than it is an argument against the produce of the hive to say that the bees of Trebisonde feed on poisonous flowers and brew poisonous honey. It will then be said that at least the imagination is a very unhealthy faculty, and that we ought by all means to keep it down. Even poets have said as much. Shenstone is a delightful companion to all who can relish the manliness, the freedom, the unaffected ease of a hearty, well-witted, and tasteful country gentle- man. He deserves to be better known than he is, and not every one will resist the following pleasant invita- tion, here given as in a manner showing that, when he BEAUTY OF POESY. 269 chose, he could regard poetry in the light of a healthy and familiar feeling. " You who can frame a tuneful song, And hum it as you ride along ; And, trotting on the king's highway, Snatch from the hedge a sprig of bay ; Accept this verse, howe'er it flows. From one that is your friend in prose." Yet the man who could so write, could at another time bring himself to speak of poetry, if not in his very heart to regard it, as a mere sickly hankering. '' Poetry and Consumption," he says, " are the most flattering of diseases." Therefore, let poetiy yield to philosophy ; let the imagination give place to the understanding. It is quite true, that in some minds poetry may be- come a disease ; but so also in other minds may philo- sophy. And there cannot well be a gi-eater mistake than to oppose Judgment to Imagination, or to con- sider them, as often they are considered, in the light of a madman and his keeper. It would not be a gi'eater to place knowledge, which is so clear of eye, in oppo- sition to love, which we have been taught to regard as blind ; and it is the very same mistake whicli sets up reason against faith, and makes ignorance the mother of devotion^ enlightenment its enemy. Is there, then, it may be asked, no such thing as a wild imagination? In unhealthy minds there is, but nowhere else. If it be answered, that this unhealthiness of mind, and con- 270 BEAUTY OF POESY. sequent wildness of fancy, is owing to a lack of judg- ment, an appeal to facts will show that it is not 5 for then would the mind of the unjudging boy be very sickly, and his imagination crazed ; whereas, even when his imagination is most daring, it is sounder than that of the most thoughtful man. In truth, the imagination has very seldom to be curbed ; it is continually needing the spur. Very often, from the mere feebleness of this faculty, Dugald Stewart has well said, and not from any coldheartedness, arises that want of feeling with or for others, which is but too frequently charged against our fellow-men ; they do not, they cannot, imagine the situation of other people. The idea, indeed, that a poetic imagination is something very weakly, very sickly, will be found to rest upon some vitiated taste, some mistaken view of the nature of poesy. After all that Wordsworth has said, after all that he and others have done, it is too much the fashion to regard poetry as something very unreal, skyhigh, and out of the way ; an opinion greatly strengthened, if not chiefly caused, by the habit of looking into a poem, above everything, for the made-pleasure derived from happy and abun- dant images. Abundant images no more make a poem than any number of swallows make a summer. Doubt- less, in its own place, the pleasure of tracing resem- blances may be natural enough ; it has delighted every one to think the passing cloud a weasel, backed as a camel, or very like a whale. But artificial and absurd BEAUTY OF POESY. 271 most decidedly it is when desired for its own sake, and regarded, as children regard the sweetmeats at a feast, best and chief. True poetry is as real, as needful, and naturally as common to every man as the blood of his heart and the breath of his nostrils. If poetry were not part and parcel of our being, poesy would not be so widely felt and admired ; and it is always but sliort- lived when, as with Donne and Cowley, it is addressed not to feelings universal and irrepressible, but to the passing taste of a little circle. Of all such poesy, of all poesy whatsoever, we may say that it will '' fit audi- ence find, though few;" but this in a sense the very opposite of that which Milton intended ; in the sense in which we might also say that it will fit welcome find, though small. As thus far considered, the objection, by casting a slur upon the origin of poetic pleasure, is connected with a question of truth. It comes to this : Poesy may be very beautiful, but it is the offspring of disease. The fact for which we contend is here admitted in words, denied in reality ; since that which others may regard as beautiful can awaken no admiration, but rather contempt, in the mind of one who associates it with a corrupt source. Unable to hold this, the objector falls back upon the other ground above mentioned. Hai-ping no longer upon the evil cause, he now begins to harp upon the worthless effect. Thus, instead of connecting his de- 272 BEAUTY OF POESY. nial of the beauty with a denial of the truth of poesy, he now connects it with a denial of the good : Poesy may be very fine, very beautiful 5 but where is the use of it ? Here again, the point at issue is in so many words admitted, in reality is denied ; since what to an- other may be beautiful is not so to the man who can see in it no use whatsoever. The utilitarian is not the only, nor is it the highest test of beauty ; but rightly understood and applied, it is trustworthy, and it is a test by which the lovers of poesy would be willing to abide. They do not com- plain of the test, but of its wrong application. They complain that poesy is measured by utilities of the very lowest order. It is often valued at nothing, because its effect is not bodily before om' eyes. Bartholin declared that ailments, chiefly the falling sickness, were curable by rhymes ; Dr Serenus Sammonicus offered to cure a quartan ague by laying the fourth book of Homer's Hiad under the head of the patient ; and Virgil was once believed to be an excellent fortune-teller. But since poesy can do no such marvels, it is regarded as a mere game of words, a solemn trifling, wilder far than the wildest and most foolish extravagances on which the old scholastic philosophers wasted their time and blunted their wits. Of persons who so think it is enough to say that they utterly mistake the calling, the aim, and the work of the poet. The Troubadour gave to his calling the name of El Gai Saber, the gay BEAUTY OF POESY. 273 science : to suppose however that gravity of purpose may not exist under this gayety of mien is to imitate the poor ssdjr who was so greatly puzzled to under- stand how a man could blow hot and cold with one and the same mouth. The avowed object of the poet is pleasure ; but he has laid in ambush other ends as mighty and as earnest as any that rule mankind. If he seems to have his eye set upon the world, it is only as a rower who is pulling further and further away. The readers of the Tatler were in an early number informed that when any part of that paper appeared dull they were to believe that the dulness had a design. It was not a bad joke ; but will it not be far more credible, as it is most true, that the poet under the air of frolic has more or less consciously a serious purpose? Shenstone truthfully paints the village schoolmistress as sitting disguised in looks pro- found : on the contrary, the greatest of all teachers comes masked in smiles, a winebibber, half drunken with joy. Therefore he is unknown. Therefore, also, his work is constantly misjudged ; deemed most useless when haply it is most useful ; and deemed shallowest where perhaps it is deepest. A very weighty thought, if it have ornament sufficient, may rise like a balloon till it go out of sight and none but sharp eyes can see it. By itself it is heavy as ballast ; when joined to the volatile gas it seems to be lighter than air. 274 CHAPTER III. TRUTH OF POESY. It is objected that Poesy is not true ; and this, although not a very formidable charge, is certainly more for- midable than the foregoing. It carries an air of reason that has staggered not a few ; at least it has staggered many more and much stronger minds than have been swayed by the other objection. And as it is more forcible, so also does it wax bolder. For, whereas the former was stated covertly — advanced and withdrawn in the same breath — this objection is stated fearlessly and openly ; it is stated point blank. Poesy is false. Whatever the poet handles he changes into a lie. Macamut, Sultan of Cambaya, lived on poison, and thus became so deadly that flies alighting on his finger and all who drew near him were speedily killed. Even so, the poet has fed all his days on leasing, and is so thoroughly compacted of imagination that no truth can come near him and live. At once it is stricken TRUTH OF POESY. 275 dead, and he so covers it with Avit that it becomes a perfect pillar of salt. If it is to be regretted that poesy should ever have been thus regarded as fiction, it is still more to be lamented that poets should have to blame themselves most of all for the currency of that mistake. They have fostered it by precept as well as by example. When King Charles II. reproached Edmund Waller with having written a poem in honour of the Kestoration inferior to that which he had formerly composed in praise of Cromwell, here is the answer made : " Sir, the poet succeeds better in fiction than in truth ;" and what a muster-roll of poets and poetasters might be called, who, if possessed of Waller's ready wit, would with- out scrapie have vouchsafed the selfsame reply. If they have not all had opportunities of uttering such a sentiment, they have all had it in their power to coim- tenance or to discountenance it by their example ; and by their example they have too often given it their coun- tenance. Clinging to dead or dying mythologies, as they often did, with a faith which could never be en- dm-ing, it could not but be seen and said that they were setting up mere wooden idols. By degrees men came to the conclusion that poets could set up only wooden idols, and then completing the circle, came round to the belief that for this very cause the old mythologies had never had any life, never had any truth whatsoever. Bacon, who had written his Wis- 276 TRUTH OF POESY. dom of the Ancients expressly to sIioav the many and profound truths that are embedded in the classical legends, was notwithstanding, if in other of his writings we can suppose him to be in eaiTiest and not in jest, quite certain that the Greeks had little or no settled faith in their mythology ; and he thinks it reason enough to repeat the same joke in the same words, that nothing else could be expected^' when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets." This remark of Bacon's will indicate but too clearly the view which he and other philosophers have been disposed to maintain. When the poet acknowledges that his work is fictitious, there is no shame in his con- fession ,* he admits that he has been telling untruth, and yet his confession has so little meaning that he attaches neither guilt nor dishonom' to the act. The charge wears a very different, it wears a more serious aspect in the hands of the philosopher ; and, if proven, would be more than enough to consign every poet, every poem, to the limbo of everlasting infamy, and to show how unspeakably wretched is man in being cursed of God with a faculty whose highest and whose lowest and whose never-ceasing business it is to lie. In what is perhaps rightly entitled to the first place among those wonderful Essays, all brimming with wit, wisdom, and winning eloquence, in the Essay on Truth Bacon avers that the mixtm-e of a lie doth ever add pleasure, and leaves us to infer, nay pointedly declares TRUTH OF POESY. 277 that the pleasure of imagination and poesy comes of the same house and lineage. " The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind ! '' So he has been called. Is it Bacon the wisest. Bacon the brightest, or Bacon the meanest of mankind who speaks in that Essay? Whatever be the character in which he speaks, his views are seconded by other and later philosophers. Locke, in mapping out the human understanding, entirely ignored the existence of an ima- ginative faculty ; and if others have found it impossible to disown the imagination altogether as a thing be- neath their notice, they have yet been willing to treat it as a poor sinful outcast, upon whose devoted head may be laid all the iniquities and errors of the human mind, every one of which it must carry, like a scape- goat, into a wilderness of its own imagining. Bishop Butler declares it to be the " author of all error ;" a statement which at once falls to the gi'ound if it can be shown that there is any other source whatsoever. It would not be difficult to point out cases in which his vaunted reason is itself and by its very nature, an un- truthful medium, as, for instance, in the observation of circumstances fitted to awaken emotion. In such a case reason is like a fire-screen of plate glass through which one can see the fire without feeling the heat. This, however, is unimportant in comparison with other examples which might be aiforded. Mr Baynes, in 278 TRUTH OF POESY. the very able notes to his translation of the Port Rojal Logic, says of Pomponatius : — '' He was a man of acute and active intellect, and found — what all men who think long enough and deep enough will find — that the action of pui'e intellect in relation to vital truths inevitably issues in an intellectual lie ; that the last result of reason is scepticism ; that the fruit of the tree of knowledge produces still, as it did of old, death." This is true in itself, striking in its expres- sion, noble as coming from a logician, most remark- able as appearing in a logical treatise. The poet, as already has been said, in allowing that his w^ork is counterfeit, seems not to be aware that he is guilty of any baseness in producing such. He would think it scorn to tell the thing that is not, and yet he never blushes to own that in poesy he does tell the thing which is not. In truth, his thoughts are at va- riance with his confession. Appearances are against him, it may be ; at all events he admits that they are against him ; but secretly his heart bears him witness that he has neither deceived nor attempted to deceive. This would seem to be the only way of accounting for the gross absurdity of the defence with which a writer sometimes professes to meet and to set aside the charge of falsehood. Practically and in his own mind the charge has already been set aside, so that the defence offered is merely to make a show of argument. Thus George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy, (III. 7.) after TRUTH OF POESY. 279 asserting roundly that figures of speech '^ be occupied of purpose to deceive the ear and also the mind," and that, in short, the poet is a deceiver, puts forward a de- fence, in the reading of which laughter gives place to pity, pity to anger, and anger to utter astonishment. He says that " our maker or poet is appointed not for a judge but rather for a pleader, and that of pleasant and lovely causes, and nothing perilous, such as be those for the trial of life, limb or livelihood, and before judges neither sour nor severe, but in the ear of princely dames, young ladies, gentlewomen and courtiers, being all for the most part either meek of nature, or of pleasant humour ; and that all his abuses tend but to dispose the hearers to mirth and solace by pleasant conveyance and efficacy of speech." False in its facts, absurd in its reasoning, contemptible in its morality, aw^ay with such a plea ; but let us charitably suppose (though to save his heart at the cost of his understanding) that Put- tenham is here in the very common case of a man who, having come to a right conclusion, namely, that the poet is not blameworthy, is ignorant of the steps by which he arrived at it, and, in endeavouring to trace these for the benefit of another, falls into the oddest mistakes, representing himself as having been led by a route which none but a madman would have chosen to follow, and none but a fool would have ventured to describe. Sir Philip Sidney meets the charge more boldly ; like a true knight, he denies it : " Of all ^\Titcrs 280 TRUTH OF POESY. under tlie sun, the poet is least a liar." But behold the evidence on the strength of which he makes this denial : '' The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he wi'iteth." If we are not to believe it true, we must be- lieve it false ; and if he who writes what we are to account false be least a liar of all writers under the sun, and simply because of his confession, the poet would seem to be little better than the confessed robbers of Egypt.' As these, if they acknowledged their theft, were entitled to retain a fourth of the plunder, so the poet, making away with verity, is allowed to escape on condition of his giving up the one truth that he has been uttering a parcel of lies. And still the question is untouched, how far it may be right to engage in the perusal of acknowledged falsehoods. Even Johnson's mode of reply will not avail, '' Poets profess fiction," he says ; '' but the legitimate end of fiction is the con- veyance of truth ;" a Johnsonese rendering of the Spanish proverb so often quoted by Lord Bacon, Tell a lie to find a troth. Let us look the objection full in the face ; and so doing we shall discover that it is founded partly on a mere juggle of words, partly on a gi'oss misunderstand- ing of the nature of truth. In fact, whether we can prove it or not, we may rest assured, that, however likely in appearance, there can TRUTH OF POESY. 281 be no validity in a charge which, even when admitted is followed by no sentence of condemnation. At tlie very worst, the verdict of the jury is, Damages, one farthing. And a still stronger presumptive argument against it might be based on the ground that, of the three kinds of poesy, or, to speak more generally, of all the arts of representation — imitative, narrative, and lyrical, the present objection is applicable, and is applied, only to the second. Imitative or dramatic art is no- thing if not true, since an imitation, ceasing to be true, ceases to imitate ; and lyrical art is true in a still higher degree, as being the utterance not simply of sentiments truly belonging to this or to that character, but of the own and very sentiments of the artist himself. So that only against the narrative or historical element of art can the objection be raised. And it is curious to observe that it should be raised not against those arts which employ truth as the means to an end, (the drama aim- ing at the beautiful, and the lyric aiming at the good), but against that epic art which alone has truth for its ultimate end. At best, however, it is a mere trick of words. Like the conjuror's bottle that will at pleasure produce wine or water, milk or vinegar; fiction, trutli, reality, are words any of which will express ideas the most oppo- site. Our idea of the Duke of Wellington may be true, that is, correct ; but it cannot be true, that is, real : hence it is at once true and untrue. There are 282 TRUTH OF POESY. ideas, however, which are true neither in the one sense nor in the other, but simply because, like the ciphers of arithmetic or of algebra, they are symbolic of truth. The abstract idea of a triangle, for example, is not a reality, nor is it the mental image of a reality, since all three-sided figures in nature must be scalene, isosceles or equilateral, and the ideal triangle is none of the three. Or, again, the general idea of man answers to no individual in existence ; it is neither tall as the Anakim, nor short as the Bosjesmen, nor yet middle- sized ; neither black nor white 5 neither old as Parr nor young as the last infant prodigy ; it has eyes, but they are not the blue of the Saxon, nor the jet of the Gipsy, nor the hazel of the Celt, nor the pink of the Albino ,* it is neither bearded like the Arab nor beard- less like the Mongol ; it applies to all in general, and to none in particular. Those who assert that such ab- stract ideas have a real and separate existence, are now no more, unless Pierre Leroux be a Eealist, as Mr G. H. Lewes declares ; and there remain but the Nominalists and the Conceptualists, the fonner maintaining that what is called, in the abstract, Man, is only a name, the latter, that it is only a notion. In either case, it is a mere fiction of the understanding, but a true fiction, as coins and counters that are nothing in themselves, may yet be of the greatest value. There is like ambi- guity in the use of a phrase which we seem to have derived from the Americans. When they speak of TRUTH OF POESY. 283 realizing anything, they do not mean making it real, but simply having a lively idea of it,— the very anti- thesis. And it is by taking advantage of these ambi- guities that the objection against the tiiith of poesy is made to wear so imposing an aspect. But the objection consists not merely in ringing the changes upon words of equivocal meaning, it consists in ignorance of the nature of truth, a blindness that is perhaps due to wilfulness quite as often as to careless- ness or to stupidity. The world of sense has no douht a reality of its own, yet what are all its passing scenes when compared with more enduring realities ? what are they but a vain show, vanity of vanities, accidents of birth and of fortune, of wind and of rain, of time and of place ? They are not substantial ; they are only phenomenal. And yet, because the poet treats them as shadows, and refuses to treat them as substances, you say that his work is fiction, with an invidious use of the term. You would first have him secure the sha- dows of time and place, and then look after the sub- stance from which those shadows fall, whereas he more truthfully seizes the substance, and leaves the shadows to fall where they may. ]\Iatters of fact ! there is no greater dupe than he who implicitly relies upon matters of fact. The travellers, in Gay's fable of the cha- meleon, each related a matter of fact, and yet all were wrong. The kernel of the dispute lies in the question,"^ whether the truth of a man is to be found in these 284 TRUTH OF POESY. facts ? whether it is to be found in what he does, or in what he is ? The poet asserts that a man's actual doings express but partially the truth of his being ; that his actions and the circumstances of his life are but the temporary clothing of certain inner and essen- tial truths ; and that to insist upon a strict adherence to such details of costume and external environment is to sacrifice the spirit to the letter. 28; CHAPTER IV. GOOD OF POESY. It is objected that Poesy is not good. And although the objection simply means that the practical influence of the fine arts upon human conduct is to be accounted zero, it is sometimes so worded as to insinuate a sus- picion that they may not be favourable to virtue. In ad- mitting the paradox that the artist is no friend to virtue, I must be allowed to extinguish it with another para- dox, that he is not therefore a foe to morality. There is a rule of right, and when human conduct keeps to that rule, let us call it righteousness, or, as in old English, rightwiseness. The rule being ever one and the same, the righteousness must ever be one and the same ; but although outwardly one, inwardly it may be more than one. It may arise from different sources in the mind, and these are three. If it pro- ceed from sheer ignorance of evil, it is called inno- cence ; if from a disinclination to evil, it is called holi- ness ; if from the bidding of conscience, it is called 286 GOOD OF POESY. virtue. A child neither sees nor feels the temptation ; a saint may see without feeling it ; the man of virtue both sees and has to struggle. The two first act according to nature, the foraier from an inborn, the latter from a renewed natm'e ; the other acts upon principle. To this it may be replied that "^drtuous action is also according to nature, and to prove that it is Bishop Butler enters into a long argument. The remark of Sir James Mackintosh, however, must be remembered ; which was to the effect that no man so clearheaded has perhaps ever been so darkworded as Butler. His mis- takes are more than enough to make one doubt the truth of the well-known maxim that to wiite clearly you have only to think clearly. It is not because the language of a sermon is unfit for philosophic accm-acy that he thus fails : from the pen of Hobbes, of Berke- ley, of Hume, has flowed language far more homely, but seldom or never wanting in precision. Of this fail- ing the above is a striking example : while speaking of a life according to nature, Butler is always thinking of a life according to principle. Doubtless, in a certain sense, to act virtuously is to act naturally, but it is so in a sense quite different from that of the common phrase which he has taken hold of and pressed into his service. In the common use of that phrase we speak of a good-natured and of an ill-natured man ; we say it is the nature of cherubim to know, the GOOD OF POESY. 287 nature of seraphim to love. Thus a man may be so gentle that not for his life could he do anything un- kind ; or he may be so highmindcd tliat it would be impossible for him to descend to any meanness, so that he is never once visited by that fear of vulgar minds lest peradventure they may do something shabby. This is to act naturally, it is to act instinctively ; but to act by the line and rule of conscience is altogether differ- ent. In relation to the word in the above meaning, it is to act affectedly. Virtue, therefore, is not natural, as innocence and holiness are : it is affected. None the worse for that, it may still be repHed. And in truth the Avord affectation has been bandied about very recklessly, as though to affect anything were of itself to do something wrong. We may affect what is good, and so doing, the worst that can be said of us will be that what others accomplish by a strong and certain influence, we accomplish by a weak and uncertain. Weak is it ? Dugald Stewart in this country and Victor Cousin in France maintain that conscious endeavour after the right is something higher than mere instinct ; that struggle and victory is some- thing better than peace. Eight reason, the words of revelation, and the common feeling of mankind, all go against them. Eight reason: for whether is better to eat and drink from appetite, or without hunger and thirst to be guided by a kind of animal conscience, called the 288 GOOD OF POESY. sense of food ? There are poor wights to whom almost everything eatable has become a forbidden fruit. Ap- petite, if not wholly gone, at least cannot be trusted, and a new faculty arises instead, built of the ruins of appetite, the purchases of experience, the findings of reason, and the advice of the doctor, in one word, and in the old use of that word,* a Conscience ; not unlike to which is, in its higher sphere, that Conscience known as the sense of duty. Banished from the para- dise of God, with dispositions to good either very froward or very weak, at any rate no longer tmst- worthy, man is guided by a faculty built out of and upon these ruins, a faculty that appoints to every one who will submit a regimen, with which for strictness the regimen of even the strictest physician is no more to be compared than is the rule of King Log to be compared with the rule of King Stork. Those who are chiefly remarkable for their bodily ailments are not commonly liked; if hypochondriac, they are pitied and almost despised ; and even so Avould men tainted with this disease of the soul be regarded, but that we are all of us more or less tainted alike. We do indeed sneer a little at the ascetic, that is, the spiritual hypochondriac ; but surely the angels might hold every one of us not much better, and, were it not for the sadness of the tragedy and the depth of their sorrow, have long ago * " The reason why the simpler sort are moved with authority is the conscience of their own ignorance." Hooker, E. P. II. 7. § 2. GOOD OF rOESY. 289 made us the butt of all those intelligences that have it in them to laugh. The words of revelation are also against the tlieory * for does not the New Testament, on the face of it, bear witness that Love is above Law ? And the common feeling of mankind ; for, although Conscience will lead us to do many things good and fair of seeming, we know and feel that, with all their costliness and all their beauty, they are but as pearls which are made by the oyster in covering and smooth- ing the granules and scruples that trouble it in its bed. Virtue can belong only to a fallen being. Upon this benighted earth there are beings of the same feather as the angels and saints in bliss, there are innocent chil- dren, holy men and women ; but about virtue, as the very name shows, there is something so strongly human that we cannot well apply the term to any but men. Hume, to illustrate the work of imagination, brings for- ward the idea of a virtuous horse. Now, we can easily imagine an innocent horse, or a holy angel, but not so well a virtuous Houynhmm or a virtuous Peri. Vir- tue speaks of trial, sin, and sorrow j of shortcomings and backslidings ; of longings that have risen and set in the heart day after day ; of hopes to fulfil these long- ings that have waxed and waned moon after moon ; of vows that have sprung with the spring but have, alas ! too often fallen long ere the fall of each returning year ; and it is hard for us to believe or to imagine, that there T 290 GOOD OF POESY. are other beings in the like case. That there are happy- and saintly ghosts who cannot sin, and that there are wretched and devilish souls utterly lost to goodness, we know, but we cannot get rid of the belief that this life of sad straggle is peculiar to oiu'selves. From this struggle, from this life of conscious endea- vour, it is the object of our religion to set us free ; herein making good the claim which it so often puts forth to be loved, believed, and carried home as the re- ligion of peace and of joy. It is true that the Christian is remarkably thoughtful ; for, in his religion, far from one-sidedness, the energies of the whole man are called forth, wholeness or universality being one of the most striking points of Christianity, as is betokened by the fact, that saving the names of God and a few indispen- sable parts of speech, there are, if I may trust a general impression, no words that occur so often in the IS'ew Testament and in the early Christian writers, as those from the root irav — all, every : still it is not thought, faith it is which stamps him. Our religion sends us down into the pit of self-consciousness, that, as persons at the bottom of a mine, we may see the stars overhead ; and it never sends us into those depths, but to come the quicker out. Similar is the aim of poesy. Like om* most holy faith, it is favourable to all the ends of morality, but it is not satisfied with that righteousness which is of the law, and which we call virtue. It would fain put Love GOOD OF POESY. 291 instead of Law ; aiFection for affectation. Its influence is exerted not througli a system of teaching, but through a system of training. The student of poesy is not made learned in thoroughbass and counterpoint ; he is taught to solfa through the gamut of human emotions. The poet is no preacher of the law, he reads no riot act ; he rather preaches a gospel, kindles love, and trusts in the force of those sympathies which lead one man to imitate another, and by means of which Elisha, when he puts on the mantle of the Tishbite, forthwith be- comes another Elijah. If these remarks be just, they prepare us rightly to un- derstand, therefore also rightly to withstand, the charge so often brought against poesy, and against all works of imagination, that they have little actuating power, that, to use the hack illustration, many who will weep in floods for the ideal distresses of story, will move not so much as a finger to relieve the real distresses of life. The parties who make this complaint are not very con- sistent ; for, while they say that the good actions por- trayed in poesy have little practical effect upon our be- haviour, they maintain, and rightly maintain, that any- thing bad, which may be there represented, will, upon minds not duly fortified, have great evil efiect ; thus making Poesy of that incomprehensible family headed by the Irish pig, which will not do a thing when you wish, and will do it when you wish not. 292 GOOD OF POESY. In reply to sucli a statement, it would be very irk- some to repeat tlie legends of Orpheus and Ampliion, the tale of Tyrt^eus, the story of Lillibulero, to tell how Chevy Chase affected Sir Philip Sidney, what the Mar- seillaise hymn has done in France, what the Song of the Shirt has done in England, and, above all, to say what Fletcher of Saltoun said that another man said about ballads. It might thus be shown that the accusation is false, and that while the poet tells his tale, the tale tells powerfully and practically upon those who listen. Waving this, however, the accusation is worthless, even if we allow it to be true. To what does it amount ? To this, that the influence of poesy over our practice is not gTeat in degree. Now, whether in degree it be great or small, is a matter very trifling in comparison with the question, whether in kind it be high or low. In the foregoing pages, no measure has been taken of its degree ; let the degree be next to nothing ; but an attempt has been made to ascertain its kind, and that kind is the best. The in- fluence of poesy upon our dispositions may be so feeble as not to be traced in our actions ; but its influence, even at the weakest, is of a higher order than any which can be brought to bear upon conscience or a sense of duty, and which so often through that sense alone, without any feeling of love, powerfully and visibly affects practice. So that a man, mighty as leviathan, whose morality is preserved only by the salt of con- GOOD OF POESY. 293 science, though thus preserved for ever, may not be compared with the little child who, without conscience of sin, like a tiny fish in the salt sea, lives fresh, if it be but for one allotted hour. We are so taught by lips that never put yea for nay. Under the reign of Law, in so far as it agreed with that title, obedience was enforced by the spur of conscience, as is shown in the Psalms, where one cannot but be struck with the conscious integrity which the sweet singers of Israel carry about with them, and which in the kingdom of Love, where, in so far as it answers to the title, obe- dience wells up without effort, is but little known ; and of John Baptist, the last prophet of that Law, and the herald of him who was to make the eye itself full of light, the Saviour said, " Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ; notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." It is even so. Great as are the deeds of the law, the least work of love is greater. It is therefore altogether away from the point at issue to say, with whatever tmth it may be said, that poesy is weak of influence upon our practical life, or weaker than the influences that work through conscience. It is influence of the health- iest. Do you say that the first faint call of appetite, when the life of the dying man begins to return, is less or more to be desired than the largest demands of the hypochondriac ? Or, do you quarrel with Zephyr be- 294 GOOD t)F POESY. cause not equal to Eurocljdon ? Nay, is not Zephyr tlie very wind you pray for ? the wind blowing right on your course ? and how can you take advantage of Euroclydon without much and weary doubling ? THE END. Printed by Oliver & Boyd, Tweeddale Court, High Street, Edinburgh. 6o, Cornliill, London, December, ISoS. ^EW AND STANDARD WOllKS PUBLISHED BY SMITH, ELDEE & Co. WOEKS IN THE PRESS. wcial Innovators and their Schemes. \\y William Lucas Saegats^t, Author of '• The Science of Social Opulence/' &c. 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